


Episode 1: A Rival on the Horizon

by Eva_Emaria



Series: Sly Cooper and the Thieves' Legacy [1]
Category: Sly Cooper (Video Games)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Historically Accurate, Mostly Canon Compliant, Sly 6 AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-04
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-08-18 17:07:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 24,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16521167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eva_Emaria/pseuds/Eva_Emaria
Summary: Sly returns from Egypt a changed raccoon. All he wants is the safety of familiarity. But when a female raccoon invades his stomping ground, he's prepared to deal with what he thinks is a new rival for the Cooper Gang. But the Lady brings with her a threat from his past, and there is more at stake than mere reputations.(Sly 6 AU, skipping Sly 5 for now. Cross posted to FF.net. Character artwork available.)





	1. First Meeting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sly is back in Paris, but he's not the only thief around anymore...

If anyone was to look up—and few people did—they would have seen a most peculiar sight. A male raccoon in his prime with an odd looking cane, eyeing the museum like it was a piece of candy. The blue of his tunic and the yellow and red bits of his tools, especially the gold crook on his cane, should have made him stand out, yet instead he seemed to blend effortlessly into the shadows. He’d tied a cloth mask over his face, hiding the natural mask his markings gave him.

For those who knew what to look for, he was easily identified as a member of the famous Cooper family. For those who kept up with the news of the criminal underworld, they would know him as the last of his line, Sly Cooper, the leader of the Cooper Gang.

And even if they didn’t know all of that, there were little things they would notice. He looked…tired, somehow. He was all wiry muscle made from survival rather than pure training. There was something about him that was worn, though what it was remained unknown to those who didn’t know him well.

Perching on the spire of the roof, using his tail for the necessary balance, Sly looked over the city streets— _his_ city streets—and couldn’t help the slight sigh of contentment that left him. The last few years had been…insane. And he was home. Finally, finally home. He’d been lost for so long… It had only been a few weeks here, hardly more than a handful of months. For him? It had been almost a year. Bentley had explained why he hadn’t physically aged, thanks to time travel and paradoxes. Mentally was a different score.

It was habit now to pull a heist before he was allowed to sleep, to relax and feel at least slightly secure. Even if he went straight back to the hideout, he’d keep the turtle and hippo awake until he dropped dead from exhaustion around noon tomorrow (or was it today? His sense of time was shot, obviously). One little heist… Bentley and Murray had even taken the night off, exhausted from the adventure to bring him home and content to be happy that he was back for a few days. This was a simple job, just grabbing a museum piece, an Aboriginal mask that had been acquired with less than legal methods to begin with. The Guru would be more than happy to return it to its proper owners…once Sly got his hands on it. It would let him rest, and serve as the beginning of the warning to the world. Sly Cooper was back.

He jumped from the spire to the flag pole, one of many lining the museum front. Sly crouched there, patiently waiting for the spot-light to move so he could jump to the next. He had expected security to be light… Or well, at least _lighter_ than it was now. The Cooper Gang had left Paris alone ever since La Paradox, mostly because Sly had been lost.

He edged away from those memories, as well as why there had been a three-year dry spell before _that._ Carmelita still wasn’t really talking to him.

Sly focused on the next series of jumps and climbs up to the museum skylight. He would have thought they would close these up. But then, natural light was best for some of the museum features. He’d learned during his time in Egypt something Bentley must have always known—when it came to security versus ideal lighting, lighting usually won for some reason.

He found the skylight that was outside of the security for the mask. There was another directly over it, but he needed to deactivate the system first. Normally Bentley’s job, but Sly knew a few tricks of his own. Snipping the wire of the alarm attached to the skylight, he lifted it slowly and jumped down into the dark of the museum.

The only light came from the occasional security light, the flashlights of the guards running patrol, and the full moon overhead. Plenty to see by. Sly darted into the room he wanted.

His recon told him the mask was hanging on a far wall with pressure-sensitive alarms lining it. He jumped up over another sculpture to reach the security terminal. He hit a couple of keys to wake up the system.

Only it didn’t respond. Frowning, Sly pulled out his binocucom, switching it to a different setting to get a good look for sensors.

None lit up on his screen.

Had the guards not set the security alarm? That didn’t sit right with Sly. He walked over to the mask to check it out.

Hanging from the hook wasn’t the carved, wooden, _ancient_ mask that he had seen hanging there just a few hours earlier.

Gingerly, Sly reached out and grabbed the item dangling there, staring incredulously. It was a porcelain _volto_ mask, gilded in gold leaf and painted in bits of deep red-violet in a complex design. Small amethysts studded it in places—Sly recognized them as low quality, small gems that would be cheap to buy off of a jeweler. A thin green, silk if he were to guess, ribbon had been sewed into place on each side, tied into a knot towards the top, and then the ribbon had been looped so it could be hung on the hook.

It was possibly the most ornate calling card he had ever seen. And he was a Cooper, he’d seen almost everything.

A shadow passed over his face, reminding him of what he had always laughed at guards over. No one looking up. Cursing mentally, he glanced up, just in time to see a hint of a tail disappear over the edge of the skylight. Looks like he wasn’t _too_ far behind his mystery rival. Smirking, Sly spun his cane. He had a rookie to teach a few lessons to.

Climbing up to the skylight, Sly leapt out of the opening left for him. Twisting his head around, he managed to catch the blonde tip of a tail as it darted over the edge of the museum. _He’s fast,_ the Cooper realized, unaware of the slight smile that was on his face. Maybe this could be a little fun…

He had to avoid security lights, but he managed to reach the street level with little problem. Rounding the corner, he actually caught a full-look at, well, at the tail rather than just the tip of it. It was definitely blonde and bushy…and were those stripes? _Some kind of cat,_ Sly thought in annoyance. Cats were the worst to deal with, as those sword dancers in Arabia had taught him.

Sly was wondering how long this thief was going to stay on the street as he darted into an alley after them—street-level was never a good idea while carrying loot. And then he caught his first good look at who he was changing.

It was no he, that was obvious. Slight she might be, but there was no mistaking the curves of a young female…something, he was sticking with cat unless proven otherwise, even if her ears weren’t right. Her light blonde hair was pulled into a French braid except for a few strands that framed her ears and face…or would have, if it wasn’t covered with a larger version of the same mask Sly had found at the museum. Black mesh covered the eyes, making it impossible for him to see in while letting the wearer still see out. He could barely see the gold-blonde of her facial fur around it. And that was the only place he _could_ see it. She was completely covered from the neck down in practical clothing that wouldn’t stand out on the street and yet blended in to the darkness.

Sly moved to intercept her, just as she pulled something from beside her that he hadn’t seen earlier.

It was a cane.

His heart stilled.

It was a _Cooper cane._ The gold hook was distinctive, unique to the family. Only problem was, there was no other family. Sly knew this—his parents had been the end of the line, with no siblings or cousins. It’s how he had ended up in the orphanage after their murder. No one else other than him should have a cane. Hell, he hadn’t even gotten around to designing his own so this cane could go into the vault with his father’s portrait where it belonged.

How did this little snit of a thing get her hands on one? He could feel the anger bubbling up inside him, but he swallowed it down. Getting angry wouldn’t do anything but make him jump into a decision. Egypt had beat that much into his head.

The little thief hadn’t noticed him. She hit…something…on the cane, and the crook flew, up to the roof top she had been aiming for. A thin wire trailed behind it. She’d modified the cane into a grappling gun, or had someone do it for her. _Who did she think she was?_ Sly darted forward, but it was too late. The rest of the cane was following the crook up to the roof, taking the female thief with it.

He glared up after her for just a second before glancing around. There, a pipe leading up. Not the most stable of resources, but it would do. He used his own cane to get the necessary height and climbed up to the roof.

Sliding the rest of the way down the rooftop edge, Sly took the chance to outdistance her. She was shorter than him it seemed, giving him just enough of an advantage. Before she could jump to the next rooftop, he was in striking distance. Using his crook, he grabbed her waist and yanked her back. To her credit she didn’t even squeal as he threw her back to the center of the roof.

That didn’t mean she was quiet. “Sugah, there are better ways to get my attention,” she scolded. Or at least, he thought she scolded. He had no facial expression to read, which was throwing him off more than he wanted to admit.

Inwardly, he cringed. He’d gotten rid of his French accent so his nationality would remain a mystery for the most part. But that didn’t mean he liked this butchering of it that he recognized from his trips to America—Arcadian.

He pushed his annoyance to the side. “I don’t argue with what works.” Sly didn’t give her a chance to try and run from him again. Extending his reach, he got a grip on her elbow and forced her to sidestep so she was pressed against the side of the stair’s encasing. When she moved to dart to the side, he purposefully let some of the rage out. Sly slammed his free hand on the other side of that fragile mask. He was not in the mood for a game. “The cane. Where did you get it?”

She surprised him by reaching up to press her hand against his chest, leaning forward a little instead of away from him. “Manners, sugah,” she continued to scold lightly. “We ain’t even been introduced yet.” Her fingers reached up and tickled his chin before he realized she had moved. “And I’d remember seein’ such a handsome raccoon around these parts.”

Sly jerked back away from her hand enough so he could reach out and grab it. “Knock it off, kitty. I already have a girl.” And he was going to be in enough trouble with Carmelita without her finding out about a lady thief flirting with him.

He could _feel_ the tension enter her body, just from his grip on her wrist. But without her face to read, he had no idea what it was from. “I’m as feline as you are, sugah,” she drawled, leaning forward again. Rather than her hand, he felt the wood of her cane press into his stomach. “And there ain’t a lady alive that likes bein’ manhandled.”

“What makes you a lady?” he snipped back, purposefully tightening his grip even as part of his brain tried to figure out what else had a blonde fur and a fluffy striped tail besides a cat. “All I see is a thief using a tool that belongs only to the Cooper family. Meaning you stole it, and I want to know from where.”

“That must make you Sly Cooper then,” she mused softly, continuing to ignore his demands. “Folks were talkin’ like you and yer gang were retired again. Paris was up for the takin’. Much like this cane was when I found it. Ain’t that the first rule of thieves, Cooper? Finders keepers?”

Sly opened his mouth to argue with her.

He wasn’t prepared for her to sweep the crook of the cane at his ankles, knocking his feet out from underneath him. She should have gone down with him, but… Sly landed on his side with a grunt, but didn’t hear a similar sound anywhere around him…and there was something still in his hand.  Rolling on to his back, he held whatever it was in front of his face to get a better look.

It was the glove the she-thief had been wearing.

Jerking into an upright position, he saw that she had made it to the roof’s edge. There was no way he could make it to her in time.

“Paris is mine now, Cooper,” she called out to him. “If yah wanted it so badly, then yah never should have left.” And then the so-called lady back flipped in a—as much as it killed Sly to admit it—graceful twist over to the other roof before vanishing completely from his line of sight.

 _Like I had wanted to leave!_ Sly’s anger threatened to boil over. When give the option of either dying in a fiery blimp crash or being lost in time, he thought he’d made the best of lousy choices. But it seemed like no one was agreeing with him. Well, he didn’t have to take flack for it from a complete stranger that looked like she ought to still be in a schoolroom somewhere.

He scrambled up to his feet to track her down again. But a familiar sound reached his ears. Turning his head to the side, he could clearly see the red and blue lights of the police flooding over the gold of the streetlights and silver of the moon, gaudy and attention grabbing. Sly looked back to where the she-thief had vanished and let out a curse he’d picked up from Tennessee “Kid” Cooper during his short stint in the Wild West. She might have won this battle, but he’d win the war. Just like he always did. He darted across the rooftops and streetlights to the safety of the old hide-out.

And completely missed the figure hiding in the shadows a few buildings over on a higher ledge.

* * *

Tossing her braid over her shoulder, Lady glared at the end of the balance beam. She was still upset with that… that… idiot Cooper! Her, a feline? Honestly! Did she _look_ like _une chatte_? Did he somehow not know what an albino of _his own species_ look like? Her tail swished behind her in her agitation as well as to assist her balance. Absently, she pulled it in front of her, running her hands over the faint, lighter blonde stripes there, to sooth herself if nothing else.

Besides, this was old anger, a waste of energy. She’d taken a very hot bath as soon as she had gotten home, adjusting to being without her trade-mark mask as she turned from thief into a normal female raccoon. Her thieving clothes had been covered in roof-grime, no thanks to Cooper’s rough-housing. No way was she putting those back on. An old t-shirt and yoga pants were still clean, and would let her practice this new maneuver before bed without needing to change clothes again.

Even if the constantly slipping shoulder was driving her nuts. Lady tugged at it, even though she knew it was hopeless.

At least a few good things had happened tonight. One was obvious. She glanced over at her little collection. The Aboriginal mask looked much better there than it did in some stuffy museum. It somehow slipped Cooper’s notice that it wasn’t on her person during their fight. And if he didn’t know what she had done with it, she wasn’t going to tell him. It had arrived shortly after her bath.

The other was less so. Frowning, Lady twisted her cane—supposedly a tool unique to the Cooper family, though she found that hard to swallow—and looked a little more carefully at the set-up she’d made after her meeting with the final member of the Cooper family. She had noticed that he’d had skills she didn’t. Even with such a lovely distraction…

She hadn’t been lying when she’d called him handsome. But that didn’t mean a thing if he was a Cooper. Pretentious stuck-ups, the lot of them. Thought because they stole from other thieves, it made them better than others, like her or Yvenne. Her heart ached remembering the teacher she had lost after far too little time. She was near-certain that, if given enough time, Yvenne would have been able to teach her just as many tricks as this Cooper raccoon knew.

But Lady had other means. She’d never finished formal schooling, but she wasn’t an idiot. It didn’t take her long to learn any skill Yvenne had given her to figure out. And Sly had been showing off just enough that she thought she had the trick to one of his fancy moves down.

So she’d put a series of small points at the end of the balance beam for her to try that spire-jumping bit. Only unlike when she was training with Yvenne, she’d lined the floor with mats so if she took a fall, she wouldn’t be nearly as bruised. And her hip still ached from that last fall.

But this time, she had it. She knew she did. Now she just had to prove it to herself.

Flicking her tail back behind her, Lady braced herself and then took off at a run. At the end of the balance-beam, she flipped on to the palm of her hands and launched herself up into the air. Twisting again in mid-air, she fell feet-first on to the first spire and landed. She didn’t wait and continued to flip her way along the spires. She was doing it! Stopping on the last one, she balanced there for a moment and smiled.

And immediately slipped to the side, moving into a tumble before she hurt herself on the way down.

Flopping down on the mat she landed on with a thump, Lady scowled at the ceiling for only a moment as she caught her breath. She’d had it! She was so sure! She just couldn’t stay up there like _he_ could. “ _Merde_!” she hissed in annoyance, slamming her open palms against the mat just for the sound. It made her feel better, at least a little.

She reluctantly stood up and walked over to the glass doors leading to her balcony. Walking outside, she watched as the sun rose over Paris. Leaning on the railing, she sighed softly. It had taken everything she’d earned and saved to make this move and set herself up. There was no going back, even if the Cooper Gang wasn’t as retired as everyone on ThiefNet seemed to think.

She let her mouth thin into a line. She would just have to see if she could learn more of these tricks. Another meeting with Cooper might be in order.

* * *

Stepping out of the shower, Sly rubbed furiously at his coat to get all of the water out of it as he stewed. The mission that was supposed to ease his hair-trigger senses had been a bust. The hot water had eased the resulting tense muscles, but his brain was still twisting and turning even if he didn’t have a puzzle to tire it out.

The only puzzle he had to try and tear apart was that she-thief who decided to crash his heist. He still couldn’t think of what she was. The only creature besides a cat that had a striped tail like that was a raccoon like him. But not only had he not seen another raccoon in his entire life besides his parents (not counting time travel), but he knew there was no such thing as a blonde raccoon. It didn’t make any sense!

He walked back into his bedroom on the second floor of the otherwise abandoned townhouse that had served as the gang’s hideout since they left the orphanage. It was the closest thing he had to a home of his own, and the only place he had where he felt remotely safe.

A rasping sound caught his attention. Freezing, Sly reached for the cane…only to remember that it was leaning against the wall. Damn it.

The balcony door opened. “Ringtail!” a familiar Spanish voice growled.

Sly’s breath left in a whoosh. “Carmelita,” he breathed in relief. Not an enemy, not someone that was going to lock him up, not someone that was going to kill him.

The rasping sound of the shock pistol’s electric charge caught his ears. Okay, at least theoretically wasn’t going to kill him.

He held up his hands, taking a step back defensively. “Easy does it, Carmelita. I can explain—”

“Shut up, Cooper!” she snapped as she stepped fully into the dim lighting of the room. She already had that cursed pistol of hers drawn. Sometimes, Sly wondered if she slept with it. He hadn’t noticed when they’d lived together, but she’d also thought he’d lost his memories and might not have felt the need to keep it on her whenever she was around him. “You had time to try and pull a heist, but you didn’t stop to tell me that you were _still alive?”_

Oh for the love of… Rubbing the corners of his eyes, he immediately stopped being on the defense. This… This was ridiculous. “Hold it!” He held up one hand and glared at her. She looked surprised, and he supposed he couldn’t blame her. He had always been the one pushing for them to be in a relationship, and he had even claimed to understand what she had meant and felt the same before the final fight with Paradox.

But Egypt had been a wake-up call. He’d had to handle things on his own, and could no longer afford to play it safe and defensive. He wasn’t going to fall back into that bad habit now. “I literally just got back from dealing with dust devils and all sorts of trouble that I do _not_ want to get into right now. There is _still_ sand in my ears! And I had to deal with some thief who _claims_ to be a lady at the same time who also has…something she shouldn’t.” Sly was not bringing Carmelita into Cooper business again, not without more information. “Can you _no_ t give me twenty-four hours?”

“Not when those twenty-four hours means you are going to be stealing before letting me know you are alive!”

Sly, for the first time ever, was tempted to hit her. “I didn’t want to pull a heist as the first thing I did back in my own time. How could you think that?” he snapped at her. “You want the truth? The first thing I wanted was a chance to sleep somewhere I knew was safe! But I can’t sleep anymore unless I’ve pulled a heist.” He deflated a little. “I’ve… changed, Carmelita. Things happened. I need time to adjust.”

“And what about all the time I thought you had died in that blimp crash?” she reminded him. “Doesn’t that mean anything?”

It should have meant something to him that she had been worried. But all he felt was exhaustion. He stared at Carmelita blankly.

She crossed her arms, equally refusing to budge. “What thief?” she managed to ask between her teeth.

Of course, that’s what she latched on to. Annoyed, Sly waved one of his hands dismissively. “Some female. Blonde, no clue on her face. She had a full-mask—”

“A white and gold one, with amethysts.”

Sly frowned, crossing his arms. “Yeah…” he said slowly. “You familiar with her?”

“A new arrival who has been giving us trouble. I’ll update her file. You don’t need to worry about her.” Carmelita informed him, equally as dismissive. She was glaring at him still. “She’s said to be a flirt.”

 _Really?_ She was going to be jealous of some girl he didn’t even _know_ , after chewing him out for _not coming to see her first?_ Sly could hear his own teeth grinding as he clenched his jaw so tight. “I didn’t notice,” he managed to half-growl at her.

Before he could continue in what was going to be an angry tirade that the Interpol officer (maybe) didn’t deserve, there was a knock at the door before Bentley rolled right in. Not surprising, there wasn’t a lock in the house since there was no point with everyone sans Murray able to pick one and Murray capable of breaking down a door.

"What is all the noise?” he asked with a yawn. Unlike Sly, he’d already been asleep. He froze when he saw the Mexican fox standing in the middle of Sly’s room. And Sly wasn’t sure he liked the look in Bentley’s eye when he took a glance at him… Oh, wait. He was only in towel. He glared at the turtle and subtly shook his head. No, it wasn’t as bad as it looked. Clearing his throat, Bentley looked pointedly back at their guest. “Oh, hi Carmelita,” he amended with an awkward wave. “I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt your little _tête-a-tête_.” He rolled out of the door.

Unfortunately, Carmelita took that as an invitation that Bentley probably wasn’t expecting. “There is no _tête-a-tête_ ,” she growled with a pointed look at Sly. “Good day.” And she stomped past Bentley into the hallway. Sly didn’t doubt that she already knew her way to the front door.

Bentley adjusted his glasses, and then eventually looked back at the stewing raccoon. “Um—”

“Yes,” Sly answered the question before his best friend could even ask it. His jaw hurt from keeping his anger in check, and damn it all if all of those muscles hadn’t just tensed up all over again. “We are still mad at each other.” And not feeling the least bit apologetic, Sly slammed his bedroom door to try and hint that he needed to be left alone.

He stomped back in the direction of his shower. More hot water, hopefully a little sleep, and then he had a heist to plan to lure this “lady” into the open. Maybe if he dealt with that problem, he could then get back to what he should be doing. Even if delaying his conversation with Carmelita just upset her more. Her bruised ego could be dealt with later just fine.

In the hallway, Bentley stared at the door and fidgeted in a way he hadn’t in years, not since he had survived being on his own for a little while himself. “Oh dear… This is not going to end well…” he muttered before slowly rolling back to his room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> une chatte—a female cat  
> Merde—French expletive, meaning varies by context  
> tête-a-tête—literally means head-to-head, actually means having a private, intimate conversation
> 
> Lady Masque: http://fav.me/d6d8o5f


	2. Masque See, Masque Do

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sly does some sleuthing, and Lady does some showing off. Carmelita is not amused.

Sidling along the edges of Interpol’s main offices, Sly leaned over to check inside the window and made sure the office was empty. Seeing no sign of Carmelita, he jimmied the lock with his cane and slipped inside. He stayed low rather than risk standing upright and being seen by one of the other officers.

He was operating blind, in a sense. Bentley and Murray were still sleep. So should he be, if he was honest with himself. But after two hours of trying to sleep, he’d finally given up and gone to set his plans in motion. He’d catch a nap this afternoon. It would have to do. Shaking his head to keep off the edges of fatigue, he kept his mind on the job.

Thankfully, Carmelita was organized. And it looked like she had been updating the very file he needed before she’d been called away. Rather than take pictures or linger to read it, he just snagged the file, leaving behind one of his call signs so Carmelita would know at least who had it. He was going to return it, anyway…

Sly darted out the window before he got caught. He didn’t linger, immediately jumping several roofs until he was well out of screaming (and shooting) distance. Only then did he look over what he had.

The photo clipped to the front cover was definitely the female from last night. Turning the file sideways, he refrained, barely, from groaning. Her alias was Lady Masque. Of course it was. He rolled his eyes and started flipping through what information there was about her.

They weren’t certain of her real name, which was disappointing. They knew she was from Louisiana, though not specifically where. He blinked and stared at the listing of her species. A raccoon? Were they kidding him? But then he noticed a note that went to another page. Flipping over to it, he saw the testimony of a forensic expert who had examined a single hair left behind at one of the crimes. She _was_ a raccoon, an albino to be specific. It then went into a complicated explanation of what that meant for this species, but he didn’t care.

Shaking his head, Sly skimmed over the rest of the description…which was pretty lacking. A list of her other heists before he arrived and at least two crimes in Louisiana that could be linked to her. One of the officers’ from that case giving his opinion that she had been trained by another thief known only as the Yellow Rose, who had supposedly retired about the time when Sly was a toddler and never made a big splash on the international level.

He slapped the folder closed, absently tapping it against his mouth as he organized what he knew. He’d peg her somewhere between sixteen and nineteen years old, maybe twenty but that would be pushing it. Louisiana native and albino would narrow things down, as would the locations of those two jobs she pulled. He could put Bentley on finding out every piece of information he could about this Lady Masque, ruin the mystery she had.

But what would that do, really? She wasn’t doing anything other than being annoying and ruining his heists that were more for his peace of mind than anything else.

He needed more information. Which meant another conversation with her. Damn it. Grumbling, he went back to put the file where he found it before Carmelita killed him.

* * *

He jumped out of the thieves’ nest, using the paraglider to safely cross to the next building. It was too far to jump, even for him, which meant the targets wouldn’t even think of it as his escape route. God, he’d missed having the paraglider… He landed in a roll, slipping out of the harness. His fingers fumbled on the process of rolling it back up—it had been too long since he’d used this thing.

“Havin’ trouble, sugah?”

Freezing, Sly shoved the paraglider roughly into his backpack and pivoted around, his cane defensively raised.

The Lady Masque was leaning on her own cane higher on the roof, looking completely relaxed and making no move to intercept him. He was really starting to hate that mask of hers. It left him feeling off-balanced when he couldn’t see her face, even partially.

At least she had shown up.

“Sly? Everything all right?” Bentley’s tentative voice came over the communication line.

“Fine, Bentley,” Sly said shortly. “Just a little problem left to deal with it. It won’t take long.”

The high, breathy laugh was the last thing he expected to hear. It sounded oddly muffled, and he quickly made the mental jump that it came from Lady Masque just as she made the physical jump to get to the same level as him. She walked right up to him. He started when she skimmed her hand along his cane. “Sure about that?” she teased him.

Sly refused to blush. He refused. He focused resolutely on her mask’s eye-slots, even if the black mesh kept him from seeing her actual eyes. “Very. You going to tell me where you got that cane…Lady Masque?”

“Oh, you’ve done yer homework,” she cooed at him. He wasn’t sure she was mocking him until she flicked his nose when he wasn’t paying enough attention to her hands. “But please, do call me Lady, Cooper. No need for things to be so formal between us.”

“You say that, and yet you call me by my last name…” he drawled, taking a step back to protect his nose if nothing else. “What exactly do you want, Lady?”

She shook her head and waved a finger at him as if he were an errant child. “Manners,” she scolded him again. “Yah need to learn to ask nicely.”

Maybe Sly was too suspicious, but… “And if I do, will you answer my questions?”

“I didn’ say that, now did I?” she drawled back. He could _hear_ the smile in her voice.

A part of him wanted to whack her, but a louder part settled into old, familiar habits now that he had someone willing to flirt _with_ him instead of yell _at_ him. “Now that doesn’t seem very fair…” he changed his position to lean on his own cane, forcing his posture to relax.

She took the invitation to get close to him again, though she walked to the side of him, pressing her back into the side of his body. It startled him, but he forced his body not to move, even as he got a nose full of soft hair that smelled faintly of flowers and citrus at the same time.  “ _Non?”_ she said casually. “Well, we could always arrange a little trade, sugah. Information for information. You scratch my back, I scratch yers…” She purposefully tickled him a little under the chin.

“That depends on what you want to know,” he said slowly, speaking a little from in between his teeth. He didn’t dare react in either a negative or a positive reaction. Unlike Carmelita, who had been easy for him to read even at eighteen, he didn’t have a clue which way this girl was going to jump.

“Oh, I dunno… Some of them tricks of yers, for starters.”

Damn it. He should have known it was something like that. Sly immediately took a few steps back, glaring at her. “Those are Cooper family secrets. Sorry,” he apologized sarcastically. He purposefully back flipped until he landed on the building’s spire. “And you are not a Cooper.”

If he thought distance would work, he was wrong. She walked right up to his perch’s base and looked up at him. “Well… Maybe I’ll have to see about becomin’ one, sugah.”

“And how do you plan to do that?” he asked rhetorically. “There is only one Cooper around and that's me.”

There was that breathy laugh again. “Oh, you are a _naïve homme_ , ain’t yah?” she teased, her tail waving along behind her as she shifted her weight to the side in a move that screamed sex somehow without being obvious or obscene.

This time, Sly couldn’t fight the blush down. He had walked right into that one. He was losing this little spar, fast. Maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea. “No. Not showing you how to do anything,” he repeated his initial argument firmly.

“Oh sugah, I don’ need yah to show me how,” she cooed at him in a way that was only a little patronizing. “I’m a real fast learner just watchin’ yah.”

Sly snorted. Right, sure. Uh huh. Like he believed that one. Flipping from one spire to the next rapidly in the short-trail down the block, he waved his hand in a mocking salute. “Well, good luck with that, Lady,” he wished sarcastically as he landed safely on the other roof.

She took a few steps back, and then took a flying leap of her own off the building. And he felt like his jaw was going to come unhinged as she hopped along the spires as easily as a child playing hopscotch. With an overly dramatic (in his opinion) flip in mid-air, she landed on the roof next to him. “You were sayin’, Cooper?” she drawled reaching up and closing his mouth for him.

Shaking his head rapidly, he gave her a dirty look. “I don’t like you already,” he said, not sure if he was being sincere or not. Something that was bugging him came flying out of his mouth before he had time to think about it too hard. “Why can you jump higher than me?”

Without any seeming care for personal boundaries, Lady draped herself over his shoulder before she answered thoughtfully, “Hmm… Practice, sugah. Some of us have to steal to eat.”

He could feel his tail bristling as his anger rose all over again, this time lingering in the back of his throat. “Are you saying I never stole to survive? Because I can prove you wrong.” Egypt was still too big of a gaping wound for him to talk about, but there was the time before that, as he worked to get the basic skills he needed just to take on the Fierce Five. He hadn’t always been a Master Thief, even if it had always been his end-goal.

“Sly… _Sly…_ ”

He ignored Bentley’s warning mutter in his ear to focus on Lady. She was at least moderately observant and noticed his spike in tension. Or else she was just as uncomfortable with the topic as he was. She flounced away, pivoting with a wave of her tail. “I’m sayin’ not all of us have the lucky start you did,” she corrected him, as if it were that important of a detail.

And Sly lost the fragile hold over his temper. “Lucky? Lucky!” he almost spat as he stalked forward towards her. “Yes, because Clockwerk killing my parents, stealing the Thievius Raccoonus, and me having to _steal it back_ is lucky?”

His sudden movement must have startled her. She didn’t even flinch as he got right into her face…mask…but she also didn’t move back as should have been her instinct.

It didn’t stop his rant, one that had been building for a while. “And _then,_ when I thought Clockwerk was dead, another idiotic gang decides to use his parts to fuel their schemes and eventually put him back together!”

That unfroze her. “Wait, what?” she almost squeaked. She cleared her throat a little before she continued. “What did they do, raise him from the dead as a zombie or somethin’? Did they have one of the voodoo queens with them?”

Sly couldn’t stop to answer her as poison demanded to be bled off of open wounds in his soul. “And then, to make matters just perfect, I had to break into my own family vault due to the fact my father wasn’t as appreciative of his brainiac as I am.” That had hurt, having to listen to all of Dr. M’s slurs against his father, slurs he couldn’t even defend the dead raccoon from because Sly had lost him too young. “And just when I thought I could take some time off, spend it with my girlfriend… Penelope and Paradox steal Bentley’s time machine invention and try to destroy my ancestors.”

“Time machine, sugah?” Lady’s skepticism was obvious in her tone. She didn’t believe him on that last part.

He didn’t care. “And in the very end, I end up _stranded_ in time! Do you still think I’m _lucky?”_

It was dead silent on the roof as Sly caught his breath. He belated realized exactly how close he was to the strange raccoon, but he refused to be the one to take a step back.

Her head was ducked down a little. If he were to guess, she was looking at his collarbone rather than his face. “Depends,” she finally answered softly. “You alone?”

“Depends,” he threw her word back at her. “What year is it?”

“2008.”

“Not this year. But if you go back a few years… we can talk.” Or a few thousand.

She finally took a step back, just enough that she could turn her back to him. “I’ve been alone since I was _une petite fille_ ,” she told him, with only a twitch of her tail and the tone of her voice conveying exactly how hurt she still was over that. “So to me? You are very, very lucky.” And before he could find his voice to say anything in response to that, she took off at a run from a dead stop, flipping up and over to the neighboring roof.

Sly slapped a hand over his eyes. “Good one, Sly,” he grumbled sarcastically at himself before glaring up at the moon. “What’s next?” he asked rhetorically. “Another fight with Carmelita?”

“ _SLY!”_

“What, Bentley?” Sly snapped. But he didn’t need told what was going on. He heard the familiar electric surge and a yelp. Jerking his head to the side as he reflexively ran forward, he barely caught a glimpse of a familiar fox up on the roof before he had a face full of blonde hair again.

“And who is this?” Lady asked casually, her tail flicking up to brush against Sly’s nose. He would have been annoyed at her for choosing _now_ to act like this…if he hadn’t seen the singed fabric, fur, and dear God _flesh_ of one of her forearms. She’d avoided a direct hit, but she hadn’t been prepared for Carmelita’s shock pistol.

He felt a flash of guilt. Lady Masque shouldn’t have been targeted by Carmelita like this. She was just a rookie thief. But Carmelita was going to assume she was part of his Gang now… “Inspector Carmelita Fox of Interpol,” he said tensely. He didn’t mention her wound. She was obviously using her mannerisms to hide it.

“Interpol?” Lady’s mouth was slightly stiff, though if that was because of pain or surprise, he didn’t know. “Yah make interestin’ friends, sugah.”

“And who are you?” Carmelita demanded as she stepped out on to the rooftop, into the light proper. She moved stiffly, and without looking, Sly knew her tail had to be bottle-brushed in her anger. His instinct from before Egypt screamed to duck. His instinct after said to grab Lady and run. And the rest of him was confused to hell as to why he was feeling defensive of a near-stranger. So he did nothing.

Lady didn’t let the fox cow her. Instead, she leaned further on Sly. “Just call me Lady.” It didn’t escape Sly’s notice that she’d put her already injured arm behind his back to protect it.

“Oh, so that would make Sly the Tramp,” Carmelita sneered, leveling her shock pistol at the two of them. “How fitting.”

“Hmm, sounds like a lover’s quarrel,” Lady mused out loud. “This the girlfriend yah mentioned earlier, Cooper?”

“ _Ex-_ girlfriend,” the fox corrected with a growl.

Lady sniffed, an audible sound even behind her mask, to dismiss it. “Yah do realize that a fox and a ‘coon can’ breed, right sugah?” she asked Sly. “Or are yah not interested in little Coopers?”

It felt like his brain was skipping. Of course he was interested in having kids someday. Just…not right now! And it honestly hadn’t crossed his mind that he would need a female raccoon for that to be possible. Probably because Lady was officially the first one of those he’d _met_ aside from his _mother_. “I… I…” he tried to formulate a sentence, and failed.

Some instinct of self-preservation kicked in, giving him a moment of clairvoyance. Without thinking about it, he grabbed Lady by the waist and forced her to duck down with him, tucking his head over hers protectively.

The familiar, crackling sound of a shock bolt went right over his head. In fact, he dare say it singed his hat, which made him more than a little defensive. He liked his hat!

“Cooper, I ain’t that kind of lady,” she protested. Her mask was digging into his neck, too, furthering her point of how uncomfortable this was in all senses of the word.

“You could have fooled me!” Carmelita’s voice snapped.

“Keep me out of the personal life, _cherie,”_ Lady shouted back at her, annoyance dripping from each word. She wiggled free of Sly’s hold, hissing when her burnt arm brushed against his back.

Which just made Sly angry at Carmelita all over again. Okay, Lady was annoying, but dear God, Carmelita had just fired at her on sight! “She’s just a kid in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he argued, stepping in front of Lady so Carmelita could focus her attention on him. “You didn’t have to shoot her. She isn’t even armed!”

“She’s a wanted thief,” Carmelita corrected with a scowl, but Sly was relieved when she at least lowered the gun. “It’s my job to bring her in.”

“Bring her in. Not kill her,” Sly snapped back. Maybe he was over reacting. He didn’t know the female raccoon from a civilian on the street. But the smell of burning flesh had brought back too memories. Some were from Egypt, making him reflexively shy away from them. But some were from his further back in his past, when a few of her shots had gotten a little too close. “There is no way she has earned my level of reputation, and the resulting approval to shoot on sight.”

The fox definitely looked uncomfortable, her ears flicking back. “If she’s a member of the Cooper Gang…” she started to argue.

“She isn’t.” Sly’s voice brooked no argument. “I just met her last night, for God’s sake, and haven’t even told Bentley about her.”

“Thanks for that, by the way.”

He ignored the turtle’s complaining. He’d explain himself to his gang later. “She’s just a kid,” he repeated to drive the force home.

For a moment, he saw Carmelita waver. Like she had once before, when they had reached a silent understanding. And he was filled with just a small ember of hope. Maybe they would be able to talk reasonably, without the taint of lies hanging over them _for once_. Maybe she would finally meet him halfway. He forgot about the thief behind him, focusing on the woman he’d loved since he first met her.

He saw it in her eyes when Carmelita was replaced with Inspector Fox. Damn it. Reaching into his leg pouch, he pulled out a flash bang and threw it to the ground, escaping while she was blinded. Egypt had taught him so much. But when it came to his relationship with Carmelita… He wanted to remain in the dark for just a little bit longer.

* * *

 

 

Leaning against the wall, Lady bit her lip and tried very hard not to whimper. It was too early…or too late, depending on your point of view…for her to sleep yet. If she went to bed now, she’d wake up at noon and be exhausted.

But her arm was hurting. She wished she could just go to sleep and ignore it for a little while.

She’d carefully wrapped it, and even now cradled it carefully against her chest. This wasn’t her first injury, or even her first burn. Lady had to keep blinking, refusing to cry, even from pain. She’d shed enough tears when she was a little girl, there was no point to it now. It’s why she hadn’t laid down on her mattress yet. She knew as soon as her head hit the pillow, she’d cry herself to sleep. No. She was an adult now, state of Louisiana said so and everything. And adults didn’t bawl because of a little burn.

A little voice in the back of her mind pointed out the so called little burn actually covered about half of her forearm, but she ignored it, pulling her knees up to her chest and wrapping her tail around her feet. Only a couple of more hours…

Why had that Cooper interfered anyway? She still couldn’t figure that out. Her tail twitched, just the tip, in a steady beat as she thought. She wasn’t sure she understood this Sly Cooper after all. Male thieves were all the same in her experience. So why wasn’t he acting like it? Lady muttered to herself, shifting her weight a little. She wished she knew.

In the corner, a little red light flashed every couple of seconds, hidden inside an air vent. The miniature camera sent a live-feed to the master computer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Masque—mask  
> Non—no  
> naïve homme—innocent (or naïve) man  
> une petite fille—a little girl  
> cherie—darling (feminine)


	3. An Uneasy Truce

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lady tries to complete a job to keep food on the table and a roof over her head. But the past has found her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bonus chapter (since I missed a week SOMEWHERE), Happy Turkey Day!

Lady handed the vendor a handful of euros and placed the bundle of leeks into one of the three canvas shopping bags she carried with her. Consider her paranoid, but it never set right with her to have fresh meat and fresh vegetables in the same bag, and she kept bread in a separate one to avoid crushing it. The vendor handed her the change, and Lady thanked him before she moved on to the next store on her list, provided by some helpful neighbors. It was strange, doing her grocery shopping like this. There just weren’t that many supermarkets near her apartment, and her neighbors had all said the same thing—buying at individual stalls and shops saved them time, hassle, and cab fare.

And they were right. Sure, it had taken her a little bit to get the hang of it. _La crémerie_ was where she bought the little bit of cream, milk, and eggs she needed to get through the month, _la boucherie_ was the butcher. She’d already been to _la boulangerie_ , the bakery, and gotten plenty of bread and croissants for breakfast (or what counted as her breakfast, since her timetable was flipped compared to the normal person’s), and _le magasin de fruits et légumes_ , the green grocer, had been second-to-last stop. Now she just needed to stop at…Lady checked her list… _la fromagerie_ , the cheese shop, and she was done. She’d be set for the next couple of weeks.

And a good thing, too, she realized as she counted her remaining change. She was barely going to have enough money for a hunk of Swiss cheese to munch on with her bread in the morning… And now that she thought about it, her rent was due in a couple of weeks too. _“Merde,”_ she muttered. It took at least a week for the heat to fade off of a recent robbery, and then maybe another week for selling and shipping the piece off. If she was lucky.

She had wanted to bother the Cooper gang a little more. She still owed Sly for getting her shot at. Her arm was slowly healing, but it would be weeks before her fur had grown back in. At the same time though… Lady couldn’t be certain, but she thought that she’d caught the male raccoon after a heist of his own the other night. Her tail swished behind her as her annoyance spiked. For most of her early career, she’d been mistaken for a Cooper because she was a raccoon. She wasn’t about to let that start all over again.

No, apparently the teasing was going to have to wait a night. Absently running a finger from between her eyes and down her snout in a repeating motion as she thought, Lady couldn’t help the mischievous smile that crossed her face. It looked like she would be putting on her mask as soon as she got home.

* * *

Jumping from the shop awning up on to the balcony, Lady mused that her shopping had had an unexpected bonus—it had given her a strong orientation for the city. She would never have thought of an art collector hiding among a bunch of small stores, but here she was, tracking down some artwork that had been stolen by the Nazi wolves that had occupied France during World War II. Her client that had contracted her via ThiefNet had seen the paintings and recognized them from stories his grandmother used to tell him, and wanted her to steal them back for his family.

Lady didn’t particularly care, as long as the price was right. And it was. Five hundred euros per painting, and there were four of them, plus whatever trinkets she found alongside them. She’d looked up the paintings before she’d left her studio. The artist was famous for water colors of French ballerinas, and these four were no exception. One was a gaggle of girls backstage before a show, another a soloist in bright red slippers, another a pair of dancers, one dressed as the White Swan and the other as the Black, and then the last was a child trying on an adult’s dance slippers. All the dancers were swans, almost making Lady roll her eyes, but she wasn’t going to complain about what paid her bills.

The collector’s loft featured a balcony, with minimal security. He seemed to rely on the fact that no one knew the murky ownership history of the four paintings, and who knew what other pieces. Oh, he had a security system, but Lady was an old pro at deactivation those. All it took was cutting the window sensors… Digging into her belt pouch, she pulled out her little clippers and snipped the fine, black wires that had been stapled along the balcony doors.

Once the door was cracked just barely wide enough for her to fit, she slipped inside. The alarm was peeping warningly, demanding a code. Okay, so the collector had apparently splurged for a little more expensive system. Lady still knew what came next. She carefully examined the keys that had the most wear on them—two, three, five, and six. The collector’s birthdate had been easy enough to fine with a little digging, March twenty-fifth of nineteen sixty-six. She smirked and punched the numbers in the correct order, twice just in case of a silent alarm.

There, easy as pie. Pivoting neatly on the balls of her feet, Lady took stock of the situation before she moved. The less she moved, the less evidence there would be of her little visit.

The four paintings were hung on the same wall in a grid pattern, just to her right. There were a few other paintings, but she didn’t want anything else that heavy. Everything else was fragile and likely to break before she made it home with them. Paintings it was, then. She carefully made her way to the wall, pulling a small screwdriver out of her belt pouch.

The watercolors were hung beneath glass, but that was what the screwdriver was for. Grabbing the flathead top, she slipped into place and undid each of the bottom screws. The special paper was fragile, but with a delicate touch, she removed them from each frame and rolled them up to carry them in the canister strapped to her back. Rather than try to slip one of her masks underneath the glass, she hooked the ribbons over the corners just so, letting it hang right in the middle of the four frames.

Job done. With a grin hidden behind the Mona Lisa smile of her mask, Lady shouldered the canister and took another glance around. This time, she spotted something a little more interesting around the corner. Curious, she took just a few steps to take a closer look.

A _columbina_ mask, it wasn’t meant to cover as much as her own, but it was also of much finer quality. Made of leather, it had been covered in silver leaf, with real silver decorations attached in careful designs that looked as fragile as a butterfly wing. Diamonds had been set at key points to add bits of shine, and Lady could see where feathers were meant to be added on one side. The ribbon attached to it was highly degraded and fragile, its original color unknown but she would guess it to be dark rather than light. If she was forced to nail down a date, she would put it at the era of the Sun King himself, Louis XIV, though anything more specific than that would require her to consult with someone more familiar with art from the period. And it would take a brave soul to tell Lady that it wasn’t art.

She’d get it certified, of course, but she wouldn’t be selling this particular gem. Humming absently to herself, Lady broke into the glass case without setting off the individual alarm, reaching inside with careful fingers to free her newest addition to her collection. Folding the ribbons to try and keep them contained, she tucked it into her belt and pulled out a second mask to leave in its place.

A shadow passed over her from the direction of the window.

Every muscle in her body froze. Had she messed up somewhere, sending a silent alarm? No, she was sure she didn’t! Lady had been breaking and entering since before she had markings. She knew could identify whether security was above her pay grade or not, and she hadn’t been wrong since Yvenne had taken her under her wing.

That didn’t matter right now. She was cornered here. Dropping the small porcelain mask with little care of its placement for a change, Lady searched for a second exit. There was a window nearby that would lead back to the street, and should give her some cover. She didn’t dare hesitate.  Darting over, she wielded her cane like a bat, swinging the crook right through the glass.

Just as another shatter came from behind her. Whatever was out on the balcony had gotten impatient. Uncaring of the ragged glass remaining in the window, Lady jumped out of her escape route.

She tried to land in a neat flip. But as soon as she tried to throw her weight on to her injured arm, it buckled underneath her. Hissing, she shifted into a roll, reflexively bringing her arm to brace it against her stomach to protect it. Damn it, and damn that cop on top of it! She came stumbling to a stop on the neighboring roof, her cane causing almost as many bruises as her fall.

What she wanted was to lie there and catch her breath. What she did was lurch to her feet and take off at a dead run across the rooftops. It was the right thing to do. She heard tiles shatter behind her, and heard the screeching of metal. Looking over her shoulder, she didn’t see anything more than shadowy shapes taking to the air.

What had she stumbled into? Feeling her breath stutter, she jumped from one building much higher, landing on the balls of her feet. This building had one of the staircases she had noticed before, the one with a small building hiding the stairs inside that lead up to the roof. Maybe if she got out of the line of sight… She darted around to the other side of it, crouching down in the shadows, her cane defensively held in front of her.

For a moment, it was calm, and it was quiet. Almost too quiet, but considering the time of night, Lady was willing to dismiss that.

She was almost willing to move again. They’d left, they’d realized she wasn’t what they were after—

The metal roofing _shrieked_ as it was shredded. She rolled to the side, just as a sharp beak tried to pierce straight through her and got the wall of the building inside.

Lady didn’t scream. Thieves didn’t scream, even when scared. But she came dangerously close. This wasn’t a creature! Glowing red eyes glared at her. No, these were _machines._ She heard another coming close, and didn’t try to even find it, just defensively swung her cane in a blind arc.

The impact vibrated up her arm, and she heard a shriek from whatever it was she hit. Twisting her head, she saw that one of the machines was on the ground, wing jointed knocked off-joint. It met her eyes and shrieked again, trying to hop close enough to strike her with that deadly beak. She didn’t give it the chance. Running straight for it to gain momentum, she jumped into a flip over its back, swinging the cane again at its head to knock it back to the ground.

A shadow cast over her, and she glanced up. More of them, circling her. Staying here was asking to be killed. She ran for the edge of the rooftop, keeping an eye on her surroundings.

There would be more cover on the ground. Spotting a wire, Lady hooked her crook on it and swung her weight in the right direction. With the soft hiss of metal sliding on metal, she rode the wire down the hill at a speed faster than she could run. If they wanted a chase, they got one.

* * *

Looking out of the balcony window, Sly tried to resist the urge to go out for one little heist. Even picking pockets. He had to break this habit, preferably before Bentley and Murray found out.

They’d accepted his run in with Lady as just him stretching his legs after being away from Paris for so long, at least to his mind if not his body. Bentley had even forgiven him for not mentioning her to him when making a plan for their last little job, meant to remind the criminal underworld that the Cooper Gang was watching. With it being so clear that they would run into her again, there wasn’t any point, and it let them form their own opinions.

Murray had been quiet, but ever since he had studied with the Guru, he was very live-and-let-live unless someone actually threatened the safety of the gang. If anything, he was confused as to why she and Sly were at odds. Sly wasn’t going to explain it to him if he didn’t have to. Bentley’s reaction had been the one that surprised him. He’d crossed his arms, and declared he didn’t like the female, and that was the end of the discussion. And there was no rhyme or reason to that response Sly could figure out. So he’d been forced to let that go.

There was still Carmelita to deal with. Sly sighed. He hadn’t even tried to handle her yet. Not with his nerves as strung tight as they were. He wanted to. God, he wanted to. It killed him not to just run up to her and hold her in his arms and tell her how much he had missed her. Egypt had been Hell on the survival sense, and it had been Hell because he’d been separated from everyone he cared about. But it also made everything…complicated. He thought he loved her. He trusted her. Oh, he worried about her _safety_ when she ran off on her own, and he got greener than broccoli when she flirted with someone else, but he trusted her. Trust was hard earned for a thief like him.

It was himself that he didn’t trust. Not right now. Not when he saw danger at every corner, when all it took was one wrong noise. Not when even after a heist, he was lucky to sleep until noon, the equivilant of only about four a.m. to a normal person. Not when it took the wrong phrase, the wrong _word_ , and they’d start yelling at each other.

He wanted to wait until he could put the thieving away again. Then they could be happy like they were. And this time he’d stay that way, live off the fortune his family had left him. And maybe he would be the end of the Cooper line, but he would be happy, he would be _safe_.

A flicker of movement below him caught his eye. Reflexively, he turned to look. That didn’t mean he believed what he saw. Lady Masque was scrambling over the roof next to _his_ hideout like the cops were on her tail. A case was strapped to her back, showing that she’d had a busy night.

Oh no. She was not accidentally bringing him down with her in a bust, compromising this one place of safety. Scowling, he grabbed his cane and jumped down on to the roof in front of her.

She had to skid to a halt to avoid turning them into a pile of tangled raccoon limbs. “Not a good time for this, sugah,” she drawled, trying to side step him.

Sly raised his cane to block her path. “I think it’s an amazing time for it, actually,” he said dryly. “You know, you are getting really annoying.” He swung the cane back up to rest on his shoulders, walking with intentional swagger to stand in the middle of her path.

Lady surprised him, not taking the opportunity to flirt. “Cooper. Read. My. Lips. I’m incapable of carin’ right now. Get out of the way unless yah wanna be bird food.”

“I can’t, you’re wearing a mask,” he quipped automatically as a corner of his mind turned what she was saying around in his head in confusion. Bird food? What bird? There wasn’t a bird big enough to eat a raccoon.

At least, anymore. And now thanks to Lady, he was going to get to rehash some of his Clockwerk nightmares on top of Egypt. He scowled at her.

A shadow passed overhead, dimming the slight glow Lady’s mask gave simply by reflecting the light of the moon. Her head barely moved, and then she jumped back. He mirrored her out of reflex more than anything else.

Finally, he registered the whistling sound he was hearing wasn’t just the wind. Just as a giant hunk of metal struck the ground in between them, claws trying to grab something that was no longer there as heavy metal wings beat through the air with the effort of keeping the beast aloft. Red eyes glared out over a murderous beak.

Sly’s throat caught. No, no it couldn’t be… He took a step back, breathing shallow, and got a better look as the bird caught a draft and glided to the side. It wasn’t an owl, but a hawk, one where one wing was easily as long as Sly was tall.

“Incomin’, sugah!”

Sly didn’t think, running in a tight circle on the roof as more hawks swooped down for an attack. He wasn’t sure of the count, adrenaline making it hard for him to focus long enough.  He finally noticed a blur of gold at the edge of his vision. Halting, he saw that instead of running, Lady was actually wielding her cane a bit like a baseball bat, swinging it at the heads of the hawks before flipping and jumping out of the way of another.

They were after her, not him.

The part of him that was entirely self-serving told him to run. Consider the hideout a loss, or at least temporarily compromised, and then move on. But the part of him that was a Cooper was stronger, and insisted that he help out. And if a few good whacks to the head was all it took… Well, he had plenty of aggression to take out. Bracing himself, he threw himself into the tussle aplomb.

Between two Cooper canes, the machines fell to the rooftop in piles of rubble. Sly straightened up from his last one, and winced as his shoulders popped. He turned around to find Lady kneeling, her arm on her cane. To an outsider, it appeared casually. But he caught the shaking of her legs. “How long did they chase you?” he asked, rather than the typical question if she was alright. He had a feeling she would throw something at his head if he asked _that_ one.

_“Quinze_ … _Seize…?”_ she guessed between ragged breaths.

“Roofs?”

“Blocks.”

Sly winced. That was well over a mile, pushing two. She wasn’t just shaking from shock, she had to be exhausted from a run like that. He walked over to her, offering her his hand if she wanted it. He wasn’t surprised when she glanced at it once and then proceeded to ignore it, keeping her weight on the cane. For once, Sly was happy she had it, if it kept her from dying tonight. He knelt down to look at the one of the mechs that she had been fighting. “Who did you steal from?” he asked rhetorically.

“Not a _homme_ who could afford this kind of security, sugah,” she drawled, finally kneeling down beside him rather than try to stay standing. “There were four more of these things at the beginnin’.”

Sly looked at the blank face of her mask, and then around the roof. There were what, half a dozen mech bodies lying there now? Shaking his head in obvious disbelief, Sly used his cane to gingerly pry at the wing of the mech in front of him. “So who do they belong to?” he questioned.

This time, at least, Lady didn’t try to answer what was obviously meant as him just thinking out loud. Instead, she reached over, tapping something on the crest of the hawk. “There’s somethin’ here. Some kind of symbol... Wings, for sure, but the center ring is more complicated.” Sly waited for her to get a better look. “It’s just… gears. Like the inside of a clock.”

Wings and gears, like a clock. Sly’s mouth ran dry. It couldn’t be. But hadn’t he seen the similarities earlier, before he realized they were hawks? “Clockwerk…” he said softly without even realizing it.

Unfortunately, his temporary companion heard him. “Friend of yers, sugah?” she asked, slowly levering herself up. Belatedly, he realized she must think he knew who was behind the attack, and it might even have happened on his orders.

She couldn’t be more wrong, and she didn’t even know it. Sly held on to his temper, feeling like his hands had been dipped in ice water. “No.” He grabbed her shoulder, forcing her to look at him. “Exact opposite. Don’t even joke about that.” He had to lock the muscles in his arms to keep from shaking her for even _thinking_ it.

Lady shrugged out from underneath his hands, looking back at the mech. “So who is he?”

“Dead,” Sly said shortly. “I killed him. Twice.”

“Apparently not good enough, sugah.”

Sly twisted his head to glare at her. “I _saw_ the parts degrade into nothing. He’s gone.” But even he wasn’t so certain about that last part, not anymore.

“This ain’t answerin’ my question, Cooper.”

“Clockwerk was a member of the Fierce Five,” a familiar, nasally voice interrupted to Sly’s relief. He heard Bentley’s hovers before he saw the turtle land on the rooftop, driving his chair over to the three of them. Cold facts was exactly what the raccoon needed right now. “He was also the source of a vendetta against the Cooper family spanning over generations.” Adjusting his glasses, the turtle leaned forward in his chair to examine the mech a little closer. “And this definitely looks like the sort of technology used to build his robotic body.”

“Wait… Wait…” Holding up one of her hands to halt Bentley’s explanation, Lady used her cane to point at Bentley. “You mean that because some feather-head hated you—” The cane swung towards Sly. “—and yers, _I’m_ the one that gets attacked by the oversized metal canaries?” She twirled the cane to thump it against the ground. “That don’ make _no_ sense!”

“I agree,” Bentley said, though Sly wasn’t sure it was obvious to Lady how much it killed him to admit. “Not unless they mistook you for a Cooper.”

Sly didn’t miss the way Lady’s tail bristled at that, but he corrected Bentley anyway, “They didn’t care about me, though. They focused on her, wouldn’t even come after me.”

“Hmm…” Bentley rubbed his chin. “Well, there must be a reason. We simply have to figure it out.”

“There’s a ‘but’ hidin’ at the end of that sentence,” Lady drawled, leaning on her cane further. She was going to bolt, Sly just knew it, if she didn’t like what his gang’s brain had to say.

Bentley steepled his fingers, and the moon caught the light of his glasses just right to give them an eerie reflective quality. “Well, it will be difficult to hunt for information on Clockwerk if we are busy defending our heists from being pilfered before we even get there.”

The blonde raccoon’s whole body stiffened for a moment. “A truce.” When Bentley nodded, she stayed tense for just a moment. Sly clenched and unclenched his hand around his cane, not enough that he would drop it, but enough that he was prepared if she suddenly lunged.

God, was he on a hair trigger. If it wouldn’t earn him strange looks, he’d shake his head to try and get rid of the tension there, maybe shake his shoulders to loosen up his whole frame too. But he didn’t want Bentley to know exactly how out of sorts he was. And he especially didn’t want to give a thief who had no qualms about admitting a rivalry with him a clue into his weaknesses.

Suddenly, her body became liquid like again, and rather than keeping her distance, she was abruptly leaning against Sly’s side. It was only because she moved so quickly that he didn’t strike her—he just didn’t have the time to move. “Playin’ nice with others was never a lesson I learned well,” she mused. “We’ll just have to see…” And with a backwards flip, she was running off and away from the rooftop.

It wasn’t worth the energy to pursue her, not really. Sly looked over at Bentley and shrugged. “We’ll have to wait and see with her, it seems.”

“Hmph,” the turtle sniffed to show what he thought of that. “I’ll get Murray out here to grab one of these. I want a closer look at their interworkings.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” Sly agreed, leading the way back to their hideout. He paused for only a second. “But Bentley?”

“Yes, Sly?”

“Would you mind bolting it down to a table? Just in case?” It was bad enough he was going to have nightmares. If this thing was really a Clockwerk creation… He wasn’t certain he could trust it to stay dead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> La crémerie—the dairy store  
> la boucherie—the butcher  
> la boulangerie—the bakery,  
> le magasin de fruits et legumes—the green grocer  
> la fromagerie—the cheese shop  
> Quinze—fifteen  
> Seize—sixteen  
> Homme—man


	4. A Night at the Ballet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After a relationship disaster, Sly attempts to pull a job. It goes about as well as Lady's.

Shaking out the jacket of his tux, Sly slipped it back on the hanger over his wardrobe’s open door. The well-tailored-and-cared-for black suit stood out against the heavily-abused wood, but he didn’t care. Everything felt like it was finally coming together. He was sleeping…sort of. Rather than fix the problem with his sleep, he’d just been sleeping in batches. It wasn’t nearly as restive, but it worked.

Bentley still had no clues on the latest Clockwerk mystery. But there also weren’t any attacks that Lady had mentioned…or any sign of Lady at all. Oh, she’d been in the papers. That mask of hers was as distinctive as his Cooper cane, and she left miniatures at every crime she committed. He had to applaud her stealing from an art gallery that was obviously on the grey side of legality, and there had been a few others mentioned too, though the dates weren’t as certain. If he were to guess, she’d spent the last week lying low, and the stories in the paper were people finding her work days or weeks later.

Some sleep, crimes calm… It seemed like it was the right time to face Carmelita. It was confirmed when a glance at a calendar reminded him of a ballet the fox had wanted to see, and he had gotten tickets for months in advance, before Paradox. The opening of a new performance house, it was having a masked gala to start things off, with a night of short featurette dances with time to socialize in between. And Sly was going to make the most of it. A nice dinner, flowers, everything he could think of to woo Carmelita back, to assure her they were going to be fine, and he was going to take steps to go straight—for real this time.

A glance at the clock told him he had roughly thirty minutes to get his hair cemented to the top of his head in a mockery of behaving properly before it was time to go surprise his lady love. Smiling slightly, he whistled as he started to undress.

He’d barely gotten his belt off before he heard the phone ring from the hallway. Rolling his eyes upward, he opened his door and leaned against the frame, waiting patiently for the machine to pick up. Bentley was probably nose-deep in code, which was why the call had gone through at all. Sly wasn’t going to pick it up until he knew who was on the other line. As far as anyone knew, this house belonged to a wealthy man who kept it for tax reasons. No need to ruin that illusion.

Finally, the machine beeped. “Cooper… It’s…” a familiar, lightly accented voice said slowly, as if she was thinking about each word before she said it. “It’s Inspector Fox.”

Sly’s face felt like it would split in two. He darted for the phone as she continued, “We… haven’t talked at all lately. And there’s the ballet gala tonight...”

He reached the phone. He had it in his hand, ready to hit the call button.

“I don’t think I’ll be going.”

The muscles in his hand froze. The phone slipped from his grip to bounce harmlessly on the floor.

Carmelita continued on unawares, “I want to go, I do. But not to be with you. You’ve returned to crime, Sly. And I can’t… I can’t be okay with that.” She didn’t even say good-bye, just hanging up with a click that felt like it lasted forever.

Sly’s other hand was clenched around the table set in the hallway. He only realized it because his fingers were starting to cramp. His whole body felt like it was vibrating like a chord that had just been struck. His vision was a blur aside from the blinking red light of the answering machine. He had to concentrate just to get his fingers to unbend enough to let go. And it was like Tennessee letting his finger off the trigger. His anger and hurt bubbled up to the surface, and rather than risk take it out on anything, he let his mind slip into a more familiar set. French cursing started flowing out of him, and it didn’t stop as he stomped his way back into his room.

Only when he was certain the hallway wasn’t going to be a warzone did Bentley slowly roll out of his room. He paused in front of the blinking light of the answering machine. He looked to Sly’s door, where the sound of French cursing was still loud and clear to anyone who wanted to listen. Reaching into the drawer, he replaced the tape with a blank and went down the stairs to his lab. He’d have to see if he could find a solution to this… and keep this tape for the next time Sly had a bone-headed moment concerning the Interpol officer.

* * *

Scrolling through information, Bentley paused as he found what he thought was the ballet Carmelita had been talking about. Big gala, lots of people… The entire thing was being hosted by the house thanks to donations from one of their sponsors, a well-known international businessman who was native to Paris, even claiming his mother had been a dancer when he was growing up.

A few subtle digs proved that not only was that an exaggeration, but so were a lot of the business deals the badger’s company had been responsible for, all signed off by the head honcho himself. It could be they were all just harmless mistakes… if it weren’t for the fact that they all led to huge benefits for all members of the company, especially the CEO. No, this guy was dirty, a white-collar style of criminal.

While the Cooper Gang had kept to the more basic style of crimes, Bentley saw no reason why they couldn’t sting this guy while he was making himself so painfully available. And the badger had supplied the perfect way. Two very expensive pieces of jewelry were being included as part of the dances for two of the ballets, both belonging to the CEO’s private collection.

On one hand, Bentley felt a little sorry for the ballerinas this would involve. But on the other… Well, he had to keep Sly busy, or who knew what trouble the raccoon would get into.

He punched a series of buttons to access the intercom system lacing the house. “Guys, I think I have a job for us,” he announced with his usual flair.

The one side-effect of the intercom system, though, was that the figure perched on the roof, dangling her legs over the side as she considered climbing in, heard every word as Bentley gave Sly a short briefing before leaving him to get ready.

* * *

 

Pocketing his invitation, Sly ignored the sounds of cameras flashing from sedately behind the ropes set up leading to the ballet house. He hadn’t made more than a small splash in the society pages when Carmelita had started taking him to these things three years ago—the Cooper name meant very little outside of Interpol and thieving circles. It was just a minor miracle that he’d had the invitation tucked away with his things, rather than leaving it lying around at Carmelita’s somewhere. He wouldn’t have been in the mood for stealing something that minor from another attendant.

Stalking up the steps, he sighed when he saw that there was a slight back up as people were checked. They were being very cautious about weapons and cameras at this event, as Bentley had painstakingly found out (or rather, Sly had found out _for_ him). It’s why Sly’s cane was back at the safe house, rather than on him. He felt half-naked without it. At least he still had his mask.

Or he thought he did. He nearly jumped out of his skin when there was the slightest brushing of fabric against his face. His hands snapped up, but it was too late. His mask was gone. Sly turned his head as the first part of his body to see who was trying to rob him.

White satin gloved hands firmly framed the side of his head and forced him to look forward. “Be still, sugah,” a familiar female voice drawled.

“Lady!” he hissed, but before he could get another word out, a harder mask slipped over his face. It took him a second to realize his vision wasn’t blocked, just slightly misted over in a way he recognized from a few of his disguises. Lenses, he realized, probably the reflective kind that hid eyes but let you see out, non-prescription. The mask didn’t cover his whole face, just the upper half like he was familiar with. But it was made of leather, rather than plain cotton, and he realized the ties for it were literally sewn to it to insure it wouldn’t slip free.

Lady didn’t stop with tying the ribbons behind his head, and the next thing he knew, the sharp prickle of a comb was forcing his hair to behave differently. “Did yah glue it to yer scalp?” she asked rhetorically.

Sly refused to blush, though his shoulders stooped forward, and hoped she didn’t make it stick straight up. It did that enough on its own.

She spun him around, pushing at his shoulders to make him stand up straight. “There…” she muttered, before she did _something_ at his shirt collar. The first thing he noticed was her mask…or rather, the change in one. Rather than the masquerade art piece in place of a face he was used to (and that was startling, that he was already used to it), this one was painted a fancy gold as the base that looked like the real thing (though he doubted it was), with white brush strokes, layered to be both solid and sheer in different place. The design was a subtle sunburst around one eye, clouds over the other, with fancy scroll work along the sides and the upper lip painted solid white, the lower lip sheer.

He wasn’t exactly paying attention as he finally got a good look at her, and had to remind his stupid body that he was in love with Carmelita, and Lady was just an _annoyance_.

It wasn’t easy. The female raccoon’s hair was free from its usual braid, but rather than being loose or in a curly up-do that he was used to seeing on Carmelita, it was slick and shiny, twisted up on the back of her head with a scarf wrapped around, the end skimming over her shoulder. Her dress was somehow more distracting. It had a high collar ending in a gold and amethyst choker, with sheer sleeves starting just under her arm and cascading down her elbows, where they split in drape down her side. More sheer attached under her bust and extending down the length of her body nearly to the floor, with a thin chain lined with more, small amethysts attaching it to the top, the edges trimmed in gold embroidery. A thicker belt matching the choker with yet another amethyst sat low on her hips, starting her floor-length skirt. Gloves covered her arms up to her elbows, and a sheer shawl heavy with gold embroidery of suns and stars was wrapped around her shoulders. Every stich of fabric she was wearing was silk and white.

Once he got past the fact that he could see the pale gold fur of her stomach, Sly added up what that had to be worth and couldn’t stop his mouth, “Do you have a stake in an amethyst mine or something?”

“I inherited more than my fair share,” was her rather cryptic statement before dangling something red in front of his face. He almost went cross-eyed trying to get a better look at it before realizing it was his bow tie. “Sugah, red does _not_ go with that mask.”

He swallowed down the unease he felt at that (and wished desperately for a mirror) and defensively went into his auto-mode: snarky. “Well, since I wasn’t _planning_ on a new mask…” He tried to snag back his tie.

Lady sniffed to show what she thought of both his statement and his action, keeping his tie out of the way by slipping it into the simple white clutch he hadn’t noticed before. She also dug something else out: what took him a moment to realize was a dark blue tie nearly identical to his. “You look better in blue anyway,” she offered as if that was supposed to make him feel better, before she slipped the tie around his neck, effortlessly tying it before he could make even a token protest.

This time, he was able to at least identify the scent lingering on her—orchids and oranges, with a couple other notes underneath it. Grumbling, he tilted his chin up so she could at least tie the stupid thing on straight. As soon as she was satisfied, she attached herself to his arm as if she were his date. “Well, shall we?” she said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

Bentley’s response to that was immediately felt in Sly’s ear. “No, Sly, _no!”_ the turtle nearly screamed. “She isn’t to interfere!”

Good point. “Why am I letting you do this again?” Sly asked, for once not rhetorical.

“Because it’s socially accepted for me to have opera glasses and not you?”

He made a face back at her.

Sighing, she dug into her clutch again and held up a pair of gold, delicate opera glasses. “I have a camera hidden in here,” she said, teasingly sing-song. “One that I can guarantee that they won’ pick up in their little security check.”

It was dead silent on Sly’s radio for a moment before the turtle heaved a great sigh. “Sly… I hate to say it…”

“You and your recon photos,” Sly griped, though not with any real malice. He hadn’t been able to get ones of inside the house, and now it was biting him on the tail. Bentley was obsessed with having clear pictures. He instead directed his attention to Lady. “Is it digital?”

“I’m not _that_ old-fashioned, sugah.”

He just couldn’t help himself. Sly looked her up and down, focusing on the middle of her “dress,” before snorting. “I couldn’t tell,” he drawled.

Her ears pinned back, and her tail twitched a little, the only sign of embarrassment she gave.

Rolling his eyes upward, Sly nodded and mockingly gestured for them to enter the ballet house. He could upload the pictures using his phone, and make everyone happy…if maybe not himself. She gave an equally mocking curtsey in response to his bow, and they entered the house, looking for all the world like a couple.

As they approached the glass doors, Sly managed to catch his reflection just enough to see what his mask was now. A dark sapphire blue for the base, it had a pearly white crescent moon around one eye, flowing clouds and stars leading to the other. He wondered how much Lady had planned this…and how long she had known about his own plans.

* * *

The two dancers on stage, the Nutcracker prince in his bright red coat and shining boots and Clara in white and lace, bowed and walked off the stage. Sly politely clapped, though his attention was on the Lady beside him. He wanted to see if she spotted the marks without him telling her. The lighting on the stage changed gradually from the mystical night-blue to a warm, golden yellow. Rather than the intermissions between each ballet like Sly had been expecting, they had broken up the featurettes, which had turned out to be famous _pas de deux_ , into two “acts,” with a long intermission in between. _The Nutcracker_ had been the first out of four planned for the evening.

Even as the applause died down, two new dancers came on to the stage. The male swan was in simple black tights and tunic, with gold around the collar. The ballerina’s costume was more obvious—the black bodice with gold feather designs and stiff, rigid tutu was traditional, even if the fact they had chosen a black swan to play her wasn’t obvious enough.

Lady made a scoffing sound in her throat. “Always the swans,” she grumbled under her breath, but raised her opera glasses. Sly didn’t know what to make of that little cryptic comment as the next _pas de deux_ began, the famous one from the third act of _Swan Lake_.

Sly heard the slight clicks of the camera, and he wondered if she was taking pictures of the right thing. Oh, there was a beautiful tiara on the ballerina, one that would fetch a pretty penny. But it was the choker high on the swan’s neck that they were after. Four strings of black pearls, with black diamonds set in the gaps, held in place by gold wire and chains.

Lady slowly lowered her opera glasses to her lap, and he saw her fingers playing with… something, though he couldn’t tell what. “Very pretty,” she whispered vaguely. Probably on purpose in case anyone else in the box was listening in. “What made it catch yer eye? I don’t remember seein’ an ad for it.”

None of that could be interpreted as a plan to steal a piece of jewelry. She was good. Before Sly could answer her, she grabbed his hand for a moment, leaning her head against his shoulder. Orchids and oranges bombarded his senses again, almost so much he didn’t notice her slipping something into the palm of his hand. A memory card.

Reaching into his pocket, Sly pulled out his phone. Waking the screen covertly where Lady’s body would keep his neighbors from noticing the dim light, he inserted the memory card, loading the pictures. She’d taken pictures of the tiara, but just as many of the choker. Oh, she was _very_ good. “The choker and its sister were donated by someone who…flirts with the line between us and them.” He jerked his head slightly to the side, meaning anyone in the room. Non-thieves, they were on the white side of the grey line between the cops and crime. “We’re simply returning the good karma.”

“Why?” And Lady honestly sounded completely baffled. When he turned to look at her, he found that she was looking at him with the black, blank eyes of her mask. “Why do yah pick yer jobs that way?”

It took him a second to find the best way to phrase it. “Because they are the only jobs worth taking,” he said simply. She shook her head, making it clear she still didn’t understand. He opened his mouth to explain further, but the music of the orchestra stopped, cuing the end of the _pas de deux_. They had to be the polite audience and clap, even as the curtain closed and the house lights came on, signaling intermission. “Come on, we need to take pictures of the rest of the house,” he said softly, taking her hand and resting it in the crook of his arms.

If he expected her to scramble to her feet, he was disappointed. She gathered her clutch against her side and glided beside him. They got more than a few appraising looks as they entered the main entry way that was also functioning a bit like a ballroom tonight, but Sly was surprised when his anxiety didn’t flare under the attention. In fact, he felt a bit like his own self.

“Yer crest is showin’…” Lady murmured beside him.

“My _what?”_

“Ain’t yah ever seen a peacock or the like struttin’ around to show off?”

Sly made a face at her once he understood her. His crest was _not_ showing! He was just acting like his normal self, that’s all. But her tail twitched, and he realized she was teasing him. He nudged her with his elbow. “We aren’t that friendly,” he muttered back at her.

“But _somebody_ has to poke that ego of yers down to a decent size,” she told him lightly, dancing out of the way of his jab with a twittering laugh.

Sly moved to follow her, his eyes bright as he swept her up into a tango hold. The music was playing, he hadn’t danced in forever… Why not? And if she was dancing, she couldn’t run away from him when he got her back for smart remarks.

“Sly Cooper!”

The _hell?_ All his muscles froze at the familiar voice. Whipping his head around, he stared as Carmelita came stalking towards him, dressed in the blue and gold dress she knew he liked best, her hair artfully curled and trailing behind her like a battle banner. “Carmelita?” he couldn’t help but question in his surprise. He _had_ hallucinated her before… He held out a hand to grab one of hers as soon as he could, wanting to feel her to know she was real this time.

She got within his reach, but expertly dodged his hand. She didn’t stop, though, getting within reach of him herself and _smacking_ him across the face before he even saw her draw her hand back.

The force of the hit jerked his head to the side with a louder snap than the sound of her hand against his face. He stared blankly ahead as she began to rant at him.

“How dare you show your face here? With _her_? Did you think I wouldn’t recognize you behind that new mask? How stupid do you think I am?”

“Sly!” Bentley barked in his ear, snapping Sly back to attention.

Grabbing Carmelita’s wrist, he forced his touch to stay gentle. “You told me you weren’t going to come here,” he reminded her, giving her his most charming smile. “So I made arrangements. Nothing special at all.” He didn’t add that those arrangements included making this a job. He was feeling sick to his stomach. This had been… Some sort of test, if he knew Carmelita. She goaded him to come so she knew she’d see him. She didn’t think about how it would make him feel with her rejection, or anything else beyond her own feelings and frustrations.

“I told you I didn’t want to come with you,” she corrected him with a nasty edge to her voice. “I wanted us to have the option of leaving separately if we ended up fighting.”

How was he supposed to know that? She didn’t say it at all in her message! He forced his smile to stay in place. “A little late for that, Inspector.”

Carmelita opened her mouth to argue, but a white glove flashing in front of her face stopped her, at the same time as its twin grabbed Sly’s elbow—hard. “Stop it, the pair of yah,” Lady hissed at them as she pulled Sly back. She was stronger than he had tagged her for. “Yer makin’ a scene, and I don’ like bein’ caught up in it.” He hadn’t even realized it, but he heard the whispers around him now. Talks of philanderers, tramps, and no clear direction as to who each of the insults was meant for. “Yah want to fight? Do it afterwards. Let me at least get through tonight with _some_ of my dignity intact.”

“What dignity is that?” Carmelita sneered, looking Lady up and down.

“So says the fox in the mini-dress and hooker heels,” Lady quipped back, cutting in between the couple now that there was room and pushing at Sly’s shoulders without even needing to turn her head from where she was looking at the inspector. She shocked Carmelita into stammering, and used the silence to push Sly to get him walking. Once he was moving, she hooked her arm through his again, forcing him to keep moving until she had him safely out on one of the balconies. “The trick to that slimy charm in yer precious Raccoonus too?” she asked, sarcasm dripping from every word. “The fresh air oughta wake you up from whatever craziness that was.”

He rubbed his jaw as he inhaled sharply. She was right. The crisp smell of the gardenias growing on the balcony and the night air that was his life blood helped get him back in the right mindset for the job. Didn’t make his face stop hurting. “You couldn’t have interrupted before she whacked me?”

“We ain’t that friendly,” she told him, her ears slightly laying back from her own tension.

Sly barked a short, sharp laugh as she threw his own words back at him. Of course. It wasn’t until it personally affected her that Lady intervened. She was still her own agent, not a member of his gang, and he had to remember that. “Okay, now why this balcony?” he asked, sure enough of her personality by now to know she had a reason for pulling him here.

“Gives us a clear view of the rest of the ballroom,” she said, “Can the turtle hear me over yer earpiece?”

“Yes…” he drawled slowly. “Why?”

“I’m gonna give him a verbal lay of the place, includin’ what’s behind the doors. Takin’ pictures would make us stand out outside of the theater, especially after that lovely scene you and Miss Fox caused.”

“And you can do that _because…?”_ He ignored the barb to focus on the job. How could Lady have gotten into this place when he hadn’t been able to due to the sheer number of people running around here all day?

“I lived in a place that was a renovated ballet house. Can’t be too different. If I’m wrong, you can take it out of my cut later.”

“Cut?” he repeated, refusing to acknowledge how high-pitched his voice got. She ignored him and barreled on her outlining of the house, down to where the prima ballerina dressing rooms were most likely to be located. Before he could bring it up again, the lights flickered the two minute warning, meaning they had to get back to their seats. “We’ll talk about this later,” he hissed in her ear as they made it barely back to their box.

She giggled as if he had said something funny. Distressingly, he couldn’t figure out if it was for a cover or because she honestly thought he was amusing. Sly slouched a little in his seat as the lights came on in the nightly glow again and the curtains parted. This time, the dancers were hares, the male in a kilt and the female in an ethereal white dress with gauze wings. Unlike the previous two, Sly couldn’t place this ballet, and he hadn’t grabbed a program.

As if sensing his confusion, Lady murmured softly from beside him, _“La Sylphide_. One of the oldest romantic ballets to survive, and with that only the Dutch version.” Her explanation was more passionate than anything he’d heard her say before. “It ain’t a true _pas de deux_ , but a combination of different pieces combined together, includin’ a chorus piece that is just danced by the Sylph…the forest fairy,” she clarified.

Sly turned to look at her, and thought he saw a little of who she would have been if she wasn’t a thief, if her life had gone differently. She was a dancer at her core, a ballerina in her own right. He wondered what had made her become a thief instead of finding a house like this one to train her… Lady didn’t notice his observing, her attention on the ballet in front of her. She was also taking pictures, he realized, this time of the sister choker he’d mentioned before, again worn by the female ballerina. This one was the opposite of the first, white diamonds and freshwater pearls on silver.

She slipped him the memory card again before the ballet was even finished, her hand crossing in her lap. Sly sent them along to Bentley, flexing his fingers slightly as the lights turned a blanching white before a pair of bluebirds came out, their costumes blending in with their feathers. The music had barely started before Sly’s earpiece crackled to life. “The job is good to go,” Bentley confirmed their plan would work after seeing the pictures Lady sent him.

Perfect. Grabbing Lady’s hand, he tugged her out of the booth. He couldn’t leave a witness, after all. Better to get the slip on her after they left the theater. Sly led her to the door she said would lead backstage. “Pretend we belong here,” he told her as he opened the door and walked confidently into the narrow hall that would lead backstage.

Lady quickly caught up with him, striding along beside him with just as much quiet confidence as him. However, she hissed at him from between her teeth (he could tell even with the mask). “Weren’ we just casin’ the place?”

“Nope,” he said, pointedly popping the end syllable just to be annoying. “We’re robbing it now. That was the plan all along.”

“Yah could have _said_ somethin’, sugah.”

And he just couldn’t help himself. “Hey, _Lady_ , you invited yourself,” he pointed out with a slight laugh. She humphed to show what she thought of that, her tail twitching behind her in her annoyance. Sly took a moment to glorify in getting one over on her, and immediately felt childish for it. Shaking his head slightly, he focused on the job, leading the way to the dressing rooms.

“You’ll want Eira’s and Bina’s rooms,” Lady informed him dryly as he paused at the end the hall. “Honestly, did yah do no research at all before gettin’ here?”

“That would be Bentley’s job,” Sly corrected her before leading the way to the assigned dressing rooms as the turtle muttered in his ear about show-offs. “What’s the likelihood of them being in their rooms?”

“Unlikely. Curtain call will have them waitin’ in the wings for the end of the last set, and they’ll have taken off anythin’ that could fall off or break while takin’ another set of bows,” Lady said factually as she darted on a head of him. She stopped outside of one room, leaning her head against the edge to listen in before she went inside.

Sly briefly worried she was going to do something that would get them both caught, but he had to take the chance. He spotted Eira’s door and did the same as Lady, walking inside with caution. There was no sign of the ballerina, just the gold headdress from the Black Swan costume from before resting on a mannequin head. And laid out on a jewelry box, the lid open, was the choker. Snatching it quickly, Sly was back out in the hall before anyone could have suspected he was in the room to begin with.

Lady was already waiting for him, a similar box in her hand. The other door must have been Bina’s room. “Not bad,” he offered her a compliment.

She snorted at him, obviously not thrilled with it anyway. Feeling a little insulted, Sly tucked his box into his jacket pocket even as Lady tucked hers away into her purse. “Let’s split before we get any unwanted attention,” he said, jerking his head to the end of the hall they’d come from. Lady nodded and they quickly made their way out the same way they’d gone in.

It had been one of Sly’s smoothest heists yet. He was feeling rather pleased with himself as he shut the door behind Lady, intending on finding a way on to the roof and to the van as fast as possible.

And then he looked up and saw one very angry fox blocking the path. “Carmelita,” he greeted with a forced smile. “Whatever are you doing down here?”

She just glared at the two raccoons, reflexively reaching for where her shock pistol usually was, even though it had been confiscated by the security of the house. “I knew you couldn’t keep your thieving paws to yourself for one night. One night, Cooper!”

“I told you, I made other arrangements,” Sly defended himself weakly, taking one sliding step towards the door. Even without her pistol, he knew Carmelita could lay into him if she so desired. And she probably did right about now.

Only the wild card in this whole equation was stopping her. Lady was staying slightly to the right and in front of Sly. Carmelita couldn’t take out both of them at once without the other bolting, and for all she knew they were only after one item, and it was hidden on only one of their persons, with no clue as to which.

That didn’t stop Lady from muttering as she moved. “This one ain’t my fault. I wanted to do it later.”

His earpiece crackled to life again, “Stall for a few more seconds, Sly! We’re on our way!”

Oh, that was all too easy to do with Lady around. Sly scowled, even though she couldn’t see it as he argued back, “I told you, now was the best time.”

“Obviously it weren’, sugah!” she snapped back, turning her head slightly to look at him.

It was all the opening both Sly and Carmelita needed. He just prayed the boys were ready. As the fox lunged forward to take advantage of Lady’s temporary blind spot, Sly grabbed the female albino by the wrist, ignoring her sharp yelp as he dragged her behind him…

…right out the nearest open window.

With a hollow, metallic thunk, the two raccoons landed on top of the van, rolling to a stop just shy of the edge. Sly glanced up at the now-shattered window as Carmelita stuck her head out, uncaring of the broken glass still occasionally breaking free to drop to the ground. “I’ll get you, ringtail!” she shouted down at them, shaking one of her fists in a gesture he was all too familiar with.

Feeling a little heart-beaten, Sly touched the crown of his head in a mocking salute. “Sorry, Carmelita! Dinner sometime?”

Her inarticulate shriek of rage made a small corner of him feel better, even if the rest of him was prepared to sink right down into depression again.

Sharp pain in his calf snapped him out of it. “Hey, no need to kick me!” he snapped at Lady, twisting his head to glare at her.

A dark-gloved hand under her jaw kept her mouth shut even with her mask protecting her actual mouth (and unfortunately keeping her teeth away) as the attached arm kept her right shoulder immobilized, its twin tightly wrapped around her waist. She was fighting her attacker’s hold, thus why she kicked him. The dark-suited male was some sort of dog, and judging from his cursing, flesh and blood rather than the mechanical menaces from before.

Sly reflexively looked down. This van’s roof was painted black, not the cheerful blue he was used to. Damn it. He didn’t think and lunged forward, grabbing Lady’s attacker to use as leverage to get his body turned around so he could put the grunt by the throat. “What do you guys want from her?” he half-snarled in the mutt’s ear as between the two of the raccoons’ fighting, Lady managed to slip free.

The dog snarled himself. “Orders. Obtain or kill the female raccoon at all costs to prevent breeding,” he eventually sneered.

Reflexively, Sly’s grip tightened as he stared at Lady’s face in dead shock. Breeding…? No, no. He didn’t want to think about that right now. Focus on getting away first.

He belated remembered the dangers of the hold he had on the ambusher, obviously just a grunt in a bigger plan, and stopped as soon as the dog blacked out…and another set of squealing tires could be heard. This time checking, Sly was relieved to see the familiar van, driven by Bentley as Murray swung the back doors open. Lady beat him getting back down to the ground—the grunt must have been working alone—and paced as Sly jumped down and ran to the safety of his own van.

He stopped when he saw that she wasn’t following. “Lady!” he hissed at her.

She stopped her pacing and the disturbingly blank mask looked at him. He didn’t need to see her expression to know the rage she was feeling—it surrounded her like an aura. But there just wasn’t time to talk about it now. “Come on,” he urged her to come towards him instead, offering her hand like a gentleman. “We’ll talk about it back at the safe house.”

She seemed to think about it for a moment, her hands twitching, before she ran forward, completely blowing past his offered hand and finding her own seat in the van. Shrugging at Murray, Sly did the same and let the hippo close the door while Bentley began their getaway drive.

Things had officially gotten weird.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> pas de deux—ballet term rather than real French, it is a reference to a specific kind of ballet between two dancers, usually one male and one female and romantic leads.  
> La Sylphide—The Slyph, a famous ballet  
> Lady's Dress: http://fav.me/dcr4b76


	5. Operation: Backtrack

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The teams put two and two together to end up with four, and a plan is begun.

The ride back to the safe house was silent and tense. Rather than the usual joking and relaxing after a heist, no one dared break the quiet. Lady didn’t move in her seat. She didn’t have to. She practically vibrated with tension. Rather than risk setting her off, the boys stayed quiet until they reached the hideout. Normally, Sly wouldn’t want another thief not part of the gang near that old place, but after the attack at the museum… Lady couldn’t be excluded now.

Bentley led the way inside, with Lady close behind him. Barely through the front door next, Sly reached out and gingerly touched her shoulder.

It was like one of Bentley’s bombs detonated. She immediately whipped around in a flurry of blonde fur and white silk. “Don’ touch me,” she bit out between her teeth. She poked him in the chest with one dainty finger, which really shouldn’t have hurt as much as it did, to accent each of her words. “This is all. Yer. Fault.”

He stared at her blankly for a moment, looking from her mask to her right hand and then back. When she moved to poke him again, he grabbed her wrist rather than let her abuse him in such a…childish way. “My fault?” he repeated. “How is this _my_ fault? I exist?”

“I’m bein’ attacked so I won’ breed with you!” she snapped back at him, curling her right hand into a fist as she tried to jerk free. His grip was too strong, even with him holding her carefully enough so she wouldn’t bruise. “That translates to this bein’ yer fault!” She gave a particularly hard yank and freed her wrist.

Sly didn’t bother grabbing it back, as long as she wasn’t going to start poking him again. Instead, he pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to fight off the headache he could feel growing.

He heard rather than saw Murray come around behind him. Sly didn’t pay much mind to it… Until Murray suddenly bear hugged Lady from behind.

“What are yah _doin’?”_ she squealed, kicking with her feet. Sly had to get out of the way as she came dangerously close to hitting _him._ “Put me down! _Maintenant!”_

“Calm down, Lady,” Murray said, not even slightly out of breath from picking her up and keeping her immobilized. “We understand. You’re scared. But snapping at us isn’t going to help none. _Comprendre?”_ It was always a little shocking to here Murray speak near-flawless French. But he’d been raised in a Paris orphanage, just like Sly and Bentley, so it only made sense. He just did it so rarely, and butchered so many other languages, that it always made Sly start.

It still didn’t take Sly too long to realize what the brawn of their team said. “Wait a minute,” the male raccoon drawled out slowly even as the female stopped struggling. “She was just…scared?”

“If my readings are correct,” Bentley piped up from where he was setting up another one of his presentations, this time up on to the big screen that nearly took up an entire wall. The front room of the house was only normal for the first six feet, and then the downstairs turned into the lab built during Sly’s pseudo-retirement. It had been Bentley’s haven with Penelope…and it still was, even if parts of the lab had been dismantled during one of the turtle’s bad days. “A more accurate phrase might be…terrified out of her fur.”

Lady was grumbling in Murray’s hold, but she wasn’t fighting. Sly took it as a sign she wasn’t going to hit anyone and stepped over to lean over Bentley’s shoulder. “You have readings for emotions now?” he said skeptically, trying to make sense of the data on the turtle’s computer and failing.

“The brain reacts to certain emotions more strongly than others, Sly,” Bentley said factually, adjusting his glasses.

Holding his hands up in a sign of peace, Sly flopped down on the couch set in front of the screen to wait for whatever his brainiac had to say. Murray set Lady down and took his own seat in an armchair. With a disdainful sniff, Lady perched herself on the edge of the sofa, as far from Sly as she possibly could.

Bentley began to manipulate his tablet-like laptop screen, and the screen softly glowed as the computer woke up. Sly managed— _somehow_ —to refrain from flinching when the picture of the falcon from the other night popped up in all its red-eyed mechanical glory. Thankfully it didn’t stay that way for long, quickly fracturing off into diagrams and blueprints.

“I have examined one of the mechas that attacked Lady outside of our hideout,” the turtle said factually as data flashed over the screen. “I can safely say it is in the same style and make as our old enemy, Clockwerk.” Thankfully for Sly’s sanity, Bentley didn’t show any of their pictures of the great owl. “I have followed some of their programming back to a computer system that is familiar enough that I can only say that…” He paused, adjusting his glasses.

“Out with it, Bent,” Sly said, trying to keep his tone light.

“Sly, what’s the thirteenth of every month?”

“Back-up Day,” Sly answered the turtle’s question automatically. It was a well-known fact in the gang, don’t bother or plan a heist on the thirteenth, since that was when Bentley backed up all the information on their…computers… Sly felt a cold shiver run down his spine as he stared at Bentley blankly for a moment. “No. You aren’t serious.”

“I’m afraid I’m completely serious,” Bentley reluctantly drawled. He adjusted his glasses yet again, Bentley’s personal tick. He really was just as upset about this as Sly was. And for good reason. In a way, it was Clockwerk who had put him in that chair, or at least one of his incarnation’s, Clock La. “And it gets worse.”

“Yah don’ say?” Lady snipped sarcastically.

“I do say,” Bentley was rapidly tapping on his screen and didn’t even look up at her. “It’s programmed to eliminate female raccoons. It doesn’t care at all about Coopers—”

“Wait, wait, wait…” Lady said, holding out her hands as if that would stop him from continuing his explanation. “What do yah mean, it don’ care about Coopers? I thought the Coopers were who this feather head wanted dead?”

“They are,” Bentley adjusted his glasses again and gave her a look.

Having a little bit of pity on her, Sly reached over and grabbed her wrist, this time more carefully, lowering it back to her side. “Best to let him naturally get to the point, or he’ll never tell you,” he said softly.

She reluctantly put her hands in her lap, clenching them in impatience.

Once sure he wasn’t going to be interrupted, Bentley pulled up some sort of chart up on to the screen, a series of lines connected. “It is still after the Coopers, just… not directly. It’s ingenious, really. While the main computer is continuing with its normal plans in the public eye, as it were, the back-up is running a second plan that works much more subtly. It kills off female raccoons, so that eventually, there are no raccoons other than the Coopers. It then sends a signal to the main computer once the statistics of nonrelated is beneath a certain percentage, and, well…”

“That’s why the Fierce Five came when they did,” Sly finished for Bentley numbly. “The back-up sent a signal that there weren’t many females not already related to us left.”

“Less than a percent, according to what I was able to hack,” the turtle agreed with a sigh. “The likelihood of you finding a mate was considered less than half of that, so…”

Sly stared at the lines, finally realizing what it was showing. The destruction of a family line through attrition.

“I can’t back trace the program,” Bentley added more bad news to the pile. “So I have no idea where it is to destroy it.”

It was dead quiet for a long moment.

“So, that’s it?” Lady finally said something. “Yah can’ hack it, it supposedly doesn’ have a thing to do with you Coopers anymore, so…the lot of yah do nothin’, and I’m left to run for cover or risk bein’ _killed_ just because I have the misfortune to be the same species as the famous Cooper Clan?”

The utter disdain with which she said his name should have made him angry, but it didn’t. She was speaking from between her teeth again, not a good sign, Sly realized, and he put aside whatever her issues were with his family as he tried to keep peace between them. Lady was annoying, but he didn’t want her _dead_.

“Sure we’ll do something!” Murray assured her before Sly could say anything. “We just…” The hippo scratched the top of his head, and he looked first to Sly and then to Bentley. “What are we going to do?”

Bentley crossed his arms, looking completely unrepentant. Sly knew that as far as the turtle was concerned, yes, they weren’t going to do anything…or at least, Bentley wasn’t going to actively plan anything

Lady was a flurry of white silk again. She darted over…to the cyber-pedestal holding the Thievius Raccoonus in suspension. She snagged it before Sly could do more than draw breath and started flipping through the pages. “Henriette ‘One-Eye’ Cooper,” she read from one page. “Failed assassination attempt in 1620 off the coast of Sicily.” She flipped a couple of more pages. “Karin Coopergiwa, failed assassination attempt in 1564, Japan.”

Sly was up on his feet before he realized it, running over to her. “Give me that,” he snapped, grabbing his family’s priceless treasure before she saw something she shouldn’t. Okay, not being angry at her was one thing, but that didn’t give her permission to suddenly go off grabbing Cooper heirlooms!

And then something she’d said early came to mind. _The trick to that slimy charm in yer precious Raccoonus too?_ She’d gone right to it, somehow knowing what kept in its pages… “How do you know what’s in here anyway?” he asked slowly, now wondering if he was a little too hasty bringing her here. She knew about the Raccoonus, she had a Cooper cane…

“Sugah, the Fierce Five had it,” she reminded him, ignoring his wince. “Everyone _knows_ it exists. We just don’ know what all is in it…aside from yer family’s history.”

“Right… Yeah… You—no touching!” he said, holding the book safely away from her reach. But what she’d found had sparked his interest, and he started looking through the pages himself. What he found made him swallow. Karin Coopergiwa and Henriette Cooper weren’t the only two females Coopers who had fended off assassination attempts.

“It didn’ just target non-related females, at least not at first,” Lady said softly, to his surprise. He didn’t think she could be calm enough to be gentle about anything. “I didn’ think it sounded right, that it would automatically pick non-Cooper females. If it really wanted to work, it would have to pick off branch families too. That’s why I touched yer precious book.”

Sly nodded and carefully closed the book, running his hand along the engravings there. She was smart, he had to remember that. And Clockwerk… Clockwerk had been a monster hunting his family for generations. Not even a back-up of the friggin’ computer program could keep its beak clean of their blood.

Lady interrupted his thoughts, pressuring him a little. “We need to know what happened, Cooper. Maybe they can give us clues to find out where this damn thing is.”

“We could always go talk to the survivors,” Bentley suggested cautiously, though he was watching Sly carefully from behind those lenses.

“The first one and work our way down?” Lady suggested, heavy on the sarcasm.

But Bentley nodded. “I was about to suggest the same,” he added defensively.

Sly’s careful control couldn’t handle this. “No,” he said, clenching his hands around the book. “There is no way… You are telling me that there is some back-up of Clockwerk running around trying to kill the female raccoons, so he wins by _default_. So now we have to go _back in time_ in that cursed time machine and go through the whole spiel again…” His voice cracked a little on him. “I just _fixed_ this! Am I a maid now? Or am I Master Thief? It sure doesn’t feel like I’m stealing much lately!”

Before Bentley or Murry could jump, Sly felt a petite hand whack the back of his head. “The very future of our species is at stake here! Get a grip, Cooper,” Lady snapped at him. When he turned to stare at her, she crossed her arms, tail twitching behind her. “I don’ wanna be a Cooper, but I especially don’ wanna be one with the excuse of species survival.”

She surprised a weak chuckle out of Sly, at least, which bled the fear he was feeling over this idea of time traveling again, even if it was with much less at stake. “Because the excuse to learn Cooper tricks is so much better.”

“Not for all the chicory coffee in the world, sugah,” she said, and she relaxed a little herself. Lady tilted her head to the side with a touch of what Sly thought was hesitancy. “Sugah… I ain’t been trustin’ my ears lately. Have ya’ll been… Did yah say… _time_ machine?”

“Yes. My best invention to date,” Bentley said, a subtle dig he didn’t like what Sly had called it. “But if we are going, we need items from each of the time periods.”

“Don’t we have Karin’s Coin Magnet somewhere?” Sly barreled on rather than explaining anything, taking a step towards their home base’s trophy room. He just wanted this over with as fast as possible.

“We have no way of knowing if that is the correct year,” Bentley vetoed it quickly as he rapidly typed something into his computer. “Plus, two of those being in the same time? It’s a paradox of the worst kind.”

“Because us bein’ there ain’ bad enough,” Lady muttered, but then what Bentley was doing came up on the screen. Four dates and the respective locations of the Cooper females in question came up, and she slowly nodded. “I’ve got some things back at my place that would work for those, if this magic machine of yers exists…”

“Oh, you aren’t going.” The turtle spun around in his chair to look at her, startled. “You aren’t part of the Gang! It’s too dangerous.”

Unfortunately for Bentley, Sly could tell just from how Lady was holding herself, hands on her hips and tail swishing in smooth arcs behind her, that she wasn’t going down with a fight. “Oh _oui_ , _cher,”_ she said, sickeningly sweet. “What a brilliant idea. Leave the target alone while y’all are off huntin’ for the secrets. Oh sure, in theory I’ll never be in danger because it’s time travel…” She made air quotes around the last two words, making it clear she still didn’t believe them about it. “But then, we all know how well theory works in practice, now don’ we?”

Bentley hummed, and he muttered, but he finally gave in. “So you and Sly will need to go back to your place and get whatever these things are, and then we can leave straight from there. We shouldn’t give this program any time to plan another assault.”

Lady and Murray both nodded, making Sly’s agreement seem pointless. He grumbled, tugging at his tie, “I’ll go get changed. I refuse to go time traveling in a monkey suit.”

“I want my mask back!” Lady yelled at his retreating back, and he waved absently at her to show that he heard.

* * *

Walking back into the lab, Sly dangled Lady’s mask from his fingers with a whole new set of appreciation for it. Once he’d had it off his face so he could get a good look at it, he’d been able to tell that it was hand-made and well-crafted. Whoever had made it for her had a good, deft hand with both a needle and a brush.

He paused when he saw Lady sitting down where her head was level with Bentley’s chest, her skirts spread out over their floor. He was suspicious till he saw the blanket under her, protecting the white silk from dirt. Before he had time to figure out what was going on, her ears flattened against her head and she jerked her head to the side. “Would yah stop fiddlin’ with it?” she snapped. “I can feel it, it’s set properly, now leave it alone.”

“Yes, but it is also highly visible if your hair moves the wrong way,” Bentley said with a touch of impatience to his voice. “Hmm… It just can’t seem to blend as well on your ear like it does with Sly and Carmelita because of your light coat.”

“…Sorry for bein’ an albino,” Lady apologized through a stiff mouth. Sly didn’t need to see the bottle-brushing of her tail to know that Bentley had hit a nerve.

“Are you sure you’re a raccoon?” the turtle pressed, not realizing he was doing anything wrong. Good old Bentley was just oblivious like that.

Whether he knew it or not, Murray came in to the rescue, interrupting any fight that could begin, “What’s an albino anyway?”

Lady’s head swiveled to look at the hippo, her head tilted to the side slightly.

“Albino, a modern term used to reference a creature with albinism,” Bentley answered automatically before Lady could say anything, if she intended to. “A congenital disorder characterized by the complete or partial absence of pigment in the skin, hair and eyes due to absence or defect of tyrosinase, a copper-containing enzyme involved in the production of melanin. Some get it in spots, but they aren’t considered true albino unless all the pigment is missing from their skin, hair, and eyes. Many have eye or other health problems.”*

“So… Shouldn’t she be white, then?” Sly piped up as he heard that interesting bit of information. He’d always assumed that’s what being an albino meant. “She looks pretty blonde to me.” He winked at Lady from one of his back-up masks as he tossed her the mask she’d put on his face without permission.

She caught the mask flawlessly, holding it in her lap as she tilted it one way to the other, examining it. “I _was_ white, as a child,” she corrected him, her voice quiet and missing the tension from before. But there was something in the way her fingers tangled in the ribbons… A sadness. “I didn’ turn light blonde until I was almost in my teens, and didn’ get markin’s until a couple of years ago.” She shrugged awkwardly, and tried to speak lightly, “Papa called me a little white rat.” She gave a rough, shaky laugh that just made Sly’s heart hurt for her, and he didn’t even like her. What an awful thing for a _parent_ to say…

You could have heard a pin drop in the room for a moment, and then she looked back at Murray. “But then, not all of us can be born pink and stay that way, right hun?”

Murray scratched his head as he was suddenly the center of attention again. “Huh?”

She stared at him for a moment again and then shook her head. “Oh, yah don’… Yah don’ know. I… _Cher_ , yer an albino too.”

He jumped, obviously startled at her factual declaration. Bentley and Sly exchanged startled looks as well. Sure, they hadn’t run into any hippos, but that was more because of their line of work than anything, right? Same reason why they never saw any turtles like Bentley, only with the added problem of most hippos living in Africa, a country they’d never had an excuse to visit (yet).

“But… But I’m _pink_ , not white!” he protested.

Lady stood up and walked over to Murray, grabbing one of his hands in both of hers. The contrast of her gentleness startled Sly, if only because he was used to her being a sassy pain in his butt. But she had been kind…or tried to, anyway, earlier. It seemed mentioning family when she knew it was painful made her soft side come out.

“Hippos _are_ pink when they’re albino,” she explained carefully, “As are other animals like dolphins or sharks.” It was a slightly Bentley explanation, but then, when it came to, what had Bentley called it? Albinism, that’s it. Lady had to be an expert on it by now. “I swear, _cher_ , I thought yah knew,” she added, sounding just a little miserable. Sly didn’t blame her. Today was just turning into a crap day, and it now had the potential to turn even crappier.

Murray blinked and then slowly shrugged, clasping his other hand over Lady’s. “My parents probably did,” he said gruffly. Neither he nor Bentley liked mentioning their parents, but they would on occasion. “Don’t… Don’t worry about it right now, okay? You need to focus on the now.”

Typical Murray. Sly let out a slow breath. He probably didn’t understand exactly the implications of being an albino, but he and Bentley did…or would. Subtly, he caught the turtle’s eye and they shared a nod. Once this latest mess was dealt with, they would either drag Murray to a specialist or Bentley would become one if necessary to make sure their friend was safe.

Lady nodded at Murray slowly, most likely completely unaware of the silent conversation that just happened over her head. “Yah get any questions about it, yah talk to me, _comprendre?”_ He nodded slowly and she pulled away from him, looking to Sly and Bentley. “Let’s get movin’ then.”

* * *

Peering through the window as he waited out on the apartment balcony, Sly…was bothered. It wasn’t that this was a bad place, as long as he didn’t think about its owner. It wasn’t the penthouse, but it wasn’t a roach hotel either. It was what was missing. All he saw for furniture was a second-hand little table with two chairs and what little bit of the kitchen that he could see looked the same as it would have on move-in day. The living room space wasn’t any more than a balance beam and mats.

What did Lady _do_ when she wasn’t stealing?

Sly was tempted to break in, but then, Lady had asked him not to, since she could easily let him in as soon as she got in from the door. In fact, if he tried, he could hear her already opening the door, and really, he didn’t want to annoy her in her own territory. Bentley’s lasers came to mind.

Leaning on his cane, he decided that he wasn’t _that_ well-behaved, and started making faces against the glass.

Lady opened her front door and stared at him from the entry way, kicking the door shut with her foot. For what felt like the millionth time, Sly cursed that mask of hers. He couldn’t see her reaction, ruining all the fun of it. She opened the sliding door separating them after going through a bit of lock play, and leaned against the frame. “Are you eternally five years old?” she asked, but with very little bite to her words.

“…Maybe,” he said, “Are you going to let me in?”

“…Maybe.” She stared at him for a moment and then pivoted, swishing her tail behind her. “Let me change into somethin’ besides ballroom attire.” Before he could fight over her stalling tactic, she disappeared into what he could only assume was the bathroom.

Making a face at her back just because he could, Sly entered her apartment to take a closer look while he waited. The kitchen was just as undecorated as he was afraid of. White, white, taupe… There was no personality to this place at all. And when he looked into the alcove that served as her bedroom, he was dismayed to see only a mattress covered in pillows and blankets. She didn’t even have a _bed_.

Sly tried but couldn’t the flash of guilt he felt as he took in the slight poverty this apartment hinted at. Maybe he shouldn’t be giving her such a hard time about stealing in Paris… He looked desperately for something else to look at.

Lining the bedroom wall was a collection of masks. Some were partials, like the one that she had loaned to him, others were full masks. All of them hung by their ribbons nails, but also rested on shelves to insure the weight didn’t strain the fabric. There were two very obvious empty spaces side-by-side. He reached up and touched one of the shelves carefully, wondering… “Nice collection,” he called, rubbing his fingers together. Flecks of silver leaf clung to his gloves. Confirmed. This is where the mask she’d forced him to borrow had hung.

“ _Merci,”_ she answered absently, and he heard the sound of cabinets opening and closing behind the door.

“Friends with the artist?” he pressed for information.

“…Sorta...”

That smelled like a big, shiny button he could push. But something else caught his eye, and his head turned to crane and look.

He had been wrong. There _was_ something else in the living room. Set in shadowboxes on the wall were yet more masks, but these were obviously something more special. He knew antiques when he saw them, and all of them were in that category. In particular, an Aboriginal mask seemed to be laughing at him.

“Well, that one’s familiar,” he said sarcastically.

She heard him anyway and easily guessed what he was talking about. “Looks better on my wall!” Her voice was muffled by the door, and he could hear rustling fabric underneath her voice.

Best not to think about that. Carmelita would kill him. He forced his mouth to keep moving, ignoring how his tail was swishing side to side and his ears were craning to hear every sound they could. “You know… I was going to return this mask to its original owners.”

“Speaking of, we need to talk about these non-gang capers you’ve been pulling lately…” Bentley squawked in his ear.

“Not now, Bentley,” Sly dismissed him quickly to focus on Lady.

“And how exactly were yah gonna do that?”

He grinned. Apparently ThiefNet wasn’t up to date with everything that the Cooper Gang was up to. “A friend who simply goes by the Guru. He’s from the area and could easily get it to where it belongs.” Maybe he could pressure her into doing what he had wanted to do.

“Who is the Guru?” he could tell he had her interest piqued.

“Oh, Master! Master is awesome!” Murray piped up over their ear pieces.

“…Master…?” Lady’s dubious tone shouldn’t have surprised Sly. It sounded strange to his ears, and he knew the story. “Never mind, I don’ want to know.”

He snickered a little.

“So, you were goin’ to return it to its original owners, probably for free… Part of yer pickin’ of targets again, sugah?” she teased. “I still want an answer to why yah do it that way.”

“I already answered that!”

“Yah dodged. I want a real answer.”

He scowled, no longer quite as amused as the direction this conversation had gone. Distraction. He needed a distraction.

A little blinking red light called his name from the corner. Perfect. Even though he couldn’t see the actual camera, he had been a thief too long not to recognize one. “How paranoid are you?” he asked rhetorically. “You need to put cameras in your air vents to watch your masks?”

“… _Quoi?”_

“The camera in the vent,” he repeated, just as the bathroom door burst open. He barely noted that despite the fact she was in her stocking feet still (and those brown things were leggings, not tights, interesting) and had on no gloves, she’d managed to get her mask on and the ribbon braided through her hair as she darted past him. She grabbed one of the rickety dining room chairs and pulled it under the vent, climbing up so she was eye level with the vent…ish. She had to stand on the balls of her feet, balancing on top of the chair’s seat.

She reached into her belt pouch and pulled out a small screwdriver, expertly getting the vent cover off. Carefully, she pulled out the small camera that had been hidden there. It fit in the palm of her hand. Lady turned around to face Sly, and he was surprised to watch her kill the power between the battery and the actual camera. “Sugah…” she said very slowly. “We may be in trouble. This ain’t mine.”

A couple of things reached Sly at the same time. One, this was how they had figured out she was going to the ballet with him to plan the assault. The second… “They know where you live.”

“They know where I live,” she repeated. “ _Merde._ ”

“Ditto,” he agreed faintly. “Faster…would be better.”

Tossing the remains of the miniature camera to the floor, Lady jumped down from the chair and dragged it over to the shadow boxes. “Read me the dates, Bentley,” she demanded as she hovered between two boxes.

“1560’s Japan.”

The female raccoon settled the chair under a shadow box holding a bronze—real bronze—oni mask, climbing up and beginning to unscrew. “Next,” she demanded in a clipped tone.

Bentley took a couple of seconds. “1620’s, Italy.”

“Sugah, get the white and gold Carnivale mask for me, _s’il tu plait?”_ she half-asked Sly. “The one with the diamonds and rubies set in it?”

It wasn’t too hard to identify it. Normally, Sly wouldn’t go near her collection, or take her orders disguised as questions, but… They were in a hurry. Once she got her own shadow box open, she darted over to a closet and came out with a set of wooden boxes. She opened one and placed the oni mask inside before opening another travel box for Sly’s mask as well as one more. “Next, Bentley?”

“1790’s, England.”

“Which ancestor is _that?”_ Sly asked in confusion as he finally got the case open and the Carnivale mask put away.

“I’ll tell you later, Sly. Last one is 18—”

“No.”

Sly turned to look at Lady as she kept working on getting an emerald green and silver half-mask out of the box she was at. “What do you mean, no?” he said suspiciously.

“Sugah, there ain’t no such thing as a mask of value that’s younger than two hundred years,” she said factually, but he heard the tension in her voice. She didn’t have the last mask they needed.

It wasn’t really the time to fight over details, but he just couldn’t help himself. “What about modern art?”

“That is a matter of opinion, and stealin’ it don’ mean a thing if the artist can just make another.”

She always had a rebuttal ready, didn’t she? Rolling his eyes in slight amusement, Sly grabbed two of the boxes. “I’ll take these to the van,” he offered.

“The last—”

“I saw the sheriff badge we used last time still in the van,” Sly cut her off firmly. “We’ll use it again.” He didn’t dare linger here anymore than they had, not after finding that camera. They’d just have to stretch the machine as best as they could.

Lady nodded briskly and quickly packed the last box before she darted off to grab her gloves and boots. Sly took the boxes down to the van, handing them to Murray. He stood outside the opened doors of the van, feeling his breath catching in the back of his throat as he waited. Each second seemed to last an hour. What if this Clockwerk’s team came in as soon as he was gone? What if the apartment was trapped in a way he hadn’t noticed? He’d been bitten too many times in Egypt…

A glint of white and gold caught his eyes, and he breathed a little easier. Lady jumped down from her apartment, landing next to Sly with her own cane in hand. She hovered hesitantly, but he didn’t have the patience for it. Grabbing her elbow, he pulled her into the van. “Let’s go!”

“I still don’ believe yah about the time machine,” she protested as she opened up one of the cases, pulling out the bronze oni mask. She eyed the contraption in the van that was easy enough to deduce as the item in question. “It won’…hurt my mask, right?”

Sly rolled his eyes upward. “No. It won’t hurt it.” It didn’t really matter if she believed them that it was a time machine or not. She’d see for herself. He held out his hand, and she reluctantly gave him the mask. It was heavier than he thought, but he didn’t dare drop it, even in surprise. “Alright, Bentley. Let’s go back to Japan.”

Outside, a figure leaned on the edge of a nearby roof and watched as the van sped down the block, only to disappear at the light instead of continuing to drive on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Maintenant—now  
> Comprendre—understand  
> oui—yes  
> cher—dear (masculine)  
> merci—thank you  
> quoi—what  
> s’il tu plait—please  
> *All information on albinism is taken word-for-word from Wikipedia.
> 
> The next episode, Beware the Ladies of the Coopergiwa Clan, will begin in twelve (or so) hours!


End file.
